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Illustration/Richard Mock 


Vol. 33 #1 (351) Summer 1998 $2 

WELCOME TO AMERICA 



INSIDE: Tao of Anarchy, 
Chumbawamba’s Anarchism, Stop 
Recycling?, The Art of Wandering, 
Iraq, Unabomber Cops a Plea 







I arrived early at Clutch Cargo’s, once 
an imposing church, but now a 
trendy rock joint in yuppified 
downtown Pontiac, a gritty, pre- 
dominantly black, industrial Detroit 
suburb. The occasion was a concert 
by Chumbawamba, the anarchist pop group 
from Leeds. England, which has achieved 
is ternaiional acclaim for their catchy hit, 
"Tubchumping.” 

The song is so ubiquitous — / get 
knocked down, but I get up again; you ’re 
never going to keep me down — that not 
only has it topped the charts in Europe, 
North America and Asia with triple plati- 
- jn sales, but is now played at sporting 
ev ents worldwide, supplanting staples such 
as Queen’s, “We Are The Champions.” 
The song, featured on a promotional com- 
pilation for the new VW Beetle, was heard 
recently on cheesy TV shows like “Beverly 
Hills 902 1 0,” and “Veronica’ s Closet” and 
is also on the sound track of the Holly- 
wood production of “Home Alone 3.” 

To most listeners, there’s little more to 
Chumbawamba than a band with a pop hit 
featuring an infectious hook that everyone 
will probably be sick of by the time this is 
read. But Chumbawamba is an unlikely 
candidate for commercial stardom. Prob- 
ably unknown to most of the group’s newly 
acquired fans, the group has long been a 
favorite of the international anarchist com- 
munity for their uncompromising songs 
challenging the political state and capital- 
ism. The band’s origins go back 15 years 
in the British punk movement, and its 
members define themselves as revolution- 
ary anarchists. 

Their recent limited edition, 
“Showtime,” distributed by AK Press, an 
anarchist publisher, is a double-CD with a 
Noam Chomsky speech featured on the 
second disk. On it, the band plays a live 
performance before an enthusiastic crowd 
in a Leeds pub during a two-day benefit 
for the local Anti-Fascist Action organi- 
zation. During the concerts, a defense 
guard was on hand to protect the venue 
from English neo-nazis who had threat- 
ened to attack the event. During the night 
following the first performance, the pub’s 
windows were smashed, but the second 
evening came off without incident. 


though they had just been dropped off by 
their moms from a Saturday afternoon at a 
shopping mall. In ran a stream of hyper- 
enthusiastic 11, 12 and 13-year-olds, fol- 
lowed by their parents, many who decid- 
edly looked like they had been dragged to 
a concert they didn ’ t want to attend. Even- 
tually the audience was mainly comprised 
of adults, but a friend told me later, as if to 
emphasize Chumbawamba’ s popularity 
with pre-teens, “Yeah, They’re my eight- 
year-old’s favorite group.” 

A Rousing Hand 

I was there with several striking De- 
troit newspaper workers at the invitation 
of Nutter whom I had interviewed for 
Detroit’s weekly Metro Times. Several 
days after I spoke with her, I wondered 
whether she was aware of the almost three- 
year strike against the two local dailies, 
fearing one of the scab papers might try to 
get an interview with members of the band. 

My call was too late. Alice had already 
talked to a scab reporter and was anguished 
she hadn’t known of the boycott. She of- 
fered to let the strikers speak from the 
stage before their performance and set up 
a literature table in the lobby along with 
one from the local chapter of Anti-Racist 
Action (ARA). 

Given all the kids in the audience, we 
didn’t know what the reaction would be to 
a labor message, but when Barbara Ingalls, 
a locked-out printer, took the stage she got 
a rousing hand. Later, during the perfor- 
mance, Danbert Nobacon, another of the 
vocalists, dedicated a song to the strikers 
and took a newspaper boycott sign on 
stage with him. 

So far, so good. But Chumbawamba’s 
latest album, “Tubthumper,” was a mys- 
tery of sorts to many of their long-time 

How does an anarchist band 
from Leeds deal with being 
international pop stars? 


Spoil 



photo/peter Goettcher 

Will Success 


Chumbawamba? 


Revolutionary Anthems 

Chumbawamba played Detroit in 1993 
at 404. a small storefront anarchist club 
that held about 50 people comfortably. 
That August night, with temperatures in 
the 80's outside, about 75 sweaty people 
jammed into the space, many of them 
stripped to the waist, and danced wildly to 
the band’s infectious music and cheered 
their explicit revolutionary anthems. 

Alice Nutter, one of the band’s vocal- 
ists, remembers the event. “Yeah, we had 
to put Boffs amp on the cooker [the 
stove],” she says, “and we had to stop 
every once in a while to ask if anyone 
wanted to go to the toilet.” The place was 
so crowded that the musicians were block- 
ing the entrance to the only bathroom. 

Four years later, the band is at the 
pinnacle of international fame and many 
people in the anarchist milieu are wonder- 
ing whether success will spoil Chumba- 
w amba. How does a group that has been 
featured in every publication from The 
Sew York Times to USA Today deal with 
fame and still hang on to its anti-authori- 
tarian principles? 

When the doors to Clutch Cargo’s 
opened, the first rush of patrons looked as 


U.S. admirers. It was released in the U.S. 
on Universal, a major corporate label, and 
gone were the explicit anarchist lyrics 
denouncing oppression. Although 
tubthumping is the old name for radical 
street corner speaking, the latest lyrics are 
a gentler, more ambiguous set with noth- 
ing in them to directly suggest their core 
politics. Their big hit, a corny tribute to 
indomitability, also celebrates the male 
culture of drinking at sporting events — He 
drinks a whisky drink; he drinks a vodka 
drink; he drinks a lager drink. 

The answer to our curiosity as to 
whether we were going to see a domesti- 
cated Chumbawamba came with the first 
song — one of their old ones — ’’Give the 
Anarchist a Cigarette”— Nothing burns 
down by itself; every fire needs a little 
help. And, as if to assure the audience this 
was a band whose commitment remains 
intact, the next tune was another oldie, 
“Mouthful of Shit,” which the band dedi- 
cated to British Prime Minister Tony Blair 
and U.S. President Bill Clinton. 

Although many of the tunes they played 
were from their latest album, others were 


by Peter Werbe 

clearly anarchist and anti-religious. It was 
impossible to determine what the soccer 
moms and their kids thought while sitting 
through this, but when the band finally 
sang “Tubthumping,” the whole place ex- 
ploded. Everyone was on their feet sing- 
ing the chorus in unison, throwing their 
fists in the air, and then it was over. An 
encore? Sure. They did an a cappella ver- 
sion of their earlier “Homophobia” just so 
the words, which are sometimes lost in 
their English Midlands accents, were per- 
fectly clear —Homophobia, the worst dis- 
ease; love how you want and love who you 
please. 

Following the performance, Nutter told 
us how two days earlier the band had taped 
a performance of “Tubthumping” for TV’ s 
David Letterman Show. In the middle of 
the song they began chanting, “Free Mumia 
Abu-Jamal,” before going back to the fa- 
mous chorus. The show’s producers went 
apoplectic saying they believed Mumia 
was innocent, but that he was a “convicted 
cop killer” and the band would have to do 
the segment again or it wouldn’t air. After 
a short conference, the group members 


refused and left the studio. 

Much to their surprise, the segment ran 
as recorded, but Nutter commented after- 
ward, “I don’t think we’ll be invited back.” 

After the band appeared Jan. 20 on 
ABC-TV’s “Politically Incorrect” with 
Bill Maher and repeated the shoplifting 
advice her band often gives in interviews, 
twelve Virgin Records megastores in Los 
Angeles took “Tubthumper” off their 
shelves and put it behind the counter. 
Nutter said she believed it was just "fine" 
for poor people to shoplift records from 
chains. 

“We were dismayed by her saying this 
kind of thing,” whined Christos Garkinos, 
Virgin marketing vice-president. “Espe- 
cially since we were one of the band's 
early supporters.” 

Nutter said it was Maher who singled 
out Virgin as a possible target, and she 
attempted to change the topic to “why 
people can't afford records and feel the 
need to shoplift in an unequal world.” 

Nutter defends the less confrontational 
character of the band’s new lyrical direc- 
Continued on page 4 


SUMMER 1998 FIFTH ESTATE 


PAGE 1 




While this wretched excess proceeds, 
one casino resisted unionization efforts 
for over six years, arguing they couldn’t 
remain competitive if they had to pay 
astronomical wages like $7 an hour for 
custodians. 


Mutilator Honored 


Mumia Judge Out 

Mumia Abu- Jamal’s appeal that his 
conviction and death sentence be over- 
turned for the 1981 death of Philadelphia 
police officer Daniel Faulkner is still pend- 
ing before Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court. 
The recent election of an extreme conser- 
vative justice to a court that has never 
granted a new trial, much less dismissed 
charges for a death-row inmate, does not 
bode well. 

If the court upholds the death sentence, 
Penn. Governor Thomas Ridge promises 
to sign an immediate warrant setting a 
new date for execution. In event of this, 
Mumia’ s attorneys will go to the federal 
courts including the Supreme Court if nec- 
essary for an emergency stay. 

The only good news is that hanging 
judge Albert Sabo, who sentenced 3 1 men 
to death during his judicial tenure and 
presided over Mumia’ s original trial and 
subsequent appeal hearings, has been re- 
moved from his position following nu- 
merous complaints. Sabo’s outrageously 
biased handling of Mumia’ s case is 
tral to his appeal. 

Support continues to grow for Mumia 
including his recent election as a vice- 
president of the National Lawyers Guild. 

Contact the Committee to Save Mumia 
Abu-Jamal to be in immediate touch with 
developments in this case. The vindictive 
and corrupt apparatus of the Philadelphia 
police and their handmaidens on the court 
are anxious to dispatch Mumia quickly. 
Contact his committee at 163 Amsterdam 
Ave., #115, New York NY 10023; 212- 
580-1022; e-mail: fhostmann@msn.com. 


Bring on the commandos for the other 
leg. 

Of Whales & Wages 

The fact that casino gambling is a sure 
sucker’s bet doesn’t keep the rubes from 
flocking to the tables hoping they’ll be the 
ones to beat the odds. In Las Vegas, com- 
petition is hot to reel in what the industry 
designates as “whales,” those high rollers 
who bet in the millions each visit and have 
credit lines of up to $20 million. 

There is such intense competition 
among the casinos to land the whales that 
premium gamblers are offered lavish 
12,000 square-foot Italian marble suites 
featuring ceiling murals, Jacuzzis, swim- 
ming pools, and walls adorned with 
Picassos, Monets, and Renoirs — all gratis. 
Everything they want is free upon request 
including such amenities as vintage wine 
worth thousands of dollars a bottle. 


Armed Forest Defense 

The Samhain Earth First! Journal re- 
ports that a group of ex-Sandinistas and 
their former rivals, the Contras, are coop- 
erating to defend Nicaragua’s North At- 
lantic region rainforest. On September 12, 
60 armed members of El Frontero 
Ecologico Armado confronted loggers 
felling trees and building roads. The guer- 
rilla group confiscated 25 chainsaws and 
publicly burned them in Puerto Viejo’s 
central plaza. 

Another group, El Movimiento 
Ambiental Nicaraguaense, announced 
their intention to block main highways in 
Jinotega and Matagalpa to defend the for- 
est. Also, indigenous people are mobiliz- 
ing to defend their homes. 

For information, contact Native Forest 
Network for more information at 802- 
863-0571; e-mail: nfnena@igc.apc.org. 

Redwood Summer 
Suit Victory 

A California judge has ruled that FBI 
agents and Oakland, California Police of- 
ficers can be prosecuted for conspiracy 
and other charges relating to the 1990 car 
bombing of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. 
The two Earth First! activists began a law 
suit charging the agencies attempted to 


Damned By Faint Praise Dept.: A dis- 
pute in Espanola, New Mexico is raging 
between Hispanic and Native people over 
a statue honoring a 16th century conquis- 
tador, Don Juan de Onate. The Spanish 
adventurer suppressed the Acoma pueblo 
in 1599 and had the right foot of 24 war- 
riors cut off as punishment for their rebel- 
lion against his rule. 

During recent celebrations of the 400th 
anniversary of the first Spanish settlement 
in the American West, an Indian com- 
mando group sawed off the metal foot of 
the town’s Onate statue igniting a contro- 
versy as to whether the bloody conqueror 
is worthy of a memorial. 

Into the fray leapt Marc Simmons, a 
biographer of Onate, who defended the 
conqueror, saying that the foot chopping 
incident shouldn’t overshadow his other 
“accomplishments.” Simmons noted that 
Onate was a “founder of the livestock 
industry, the mining industry, and he 
opened the first major road, the Camino 
Real.” The writer added, “He brought 
Christianity and Western culture.” 


by Coatimundi 

W hatever one thought of Ted Kac- 
zynski before his trial, by January, 
when he admitted he was the Unabomber, 
thus avoiding a death penalty by pleading 
guilty to an 18-year bombing campaign, one 
had to feel a certain sympathy for him. After 
several weeks of struggling with a defense 
team apparently determined to portray him 
as severely mentally ill in order to save him 
from execution (even over his own objec- 
tions and desire to represent himself), and 
with a federal judge who committed a num- 
ber of egregious procedural errors that would 
have almost certainly led to successful ap- 
peals, Kaczynski apparently took the only 
option he thought he had to avoid a trial that 
would present him as an incompetent mad- 
man, and copped a plea. 

An article by William Finnegan in the 
March 16, 1998 issue of The New Yorker 
magazine, “Defending the Unabomber,” 
does a good job of reporting the Orwellian 
aspects of a trial in which clinical psy- 
chology was employed against the recal- 


citrant Kaczynski to paint him as mentally 
incompetent. Even though Kaczynski was 
found to be legally sane enough to repre- 
sent himself, experts labeled him “para- 
noid schizophrenic” merely on the basis 
of his anti-technology ideas. Finnegan, 
who is surprisingly sympathetic to the 
defendant, considering that his article ap- 
pears in a respectable bourgeois weekly, 
notes the irony in Kaczynski’s treatment. 
The Unabomber manifesto had declared 
with remarkable foresight, “The concept 
of ‘mental health’ in our society is defined 
largely by the extent to which an indi- 
vidual behaves in accord with the needs of 
the system and does so without showing 
signs of stress.” Even Kaczynski’s denial 
that he was mentally ill and his refusal to 
be treated as such by his defense team in 
the trial process were portrayed as proof 
of his insanity. When his keepers discov- 
ered he was considering suicide as a way 
out of this endgame, in the manner of 
Huxley’s Savage in Brave New World, 
they began to monitor him continually. 

See Unabomber page 23 


frame them for the incident in which the 
late Judi Bari suffered crippling injuries. 

The FBI and northern California police 
departments were collaborating with log- 
ging corporations to thwart the Redwood 
Summer project defending the state’s old 
growth forests. Earlier court proceedings 
showed Bari and Cherney were under sur- 
veillance because of their work organiz- 
ing protest activities, but the FBI claims 
they “lost” some of the most damning 
documents. 

The Redwood Summer Justice Project 
has been working for seven years to find 
the bombers, but tremendous legal efforts 
are still needed to pursue their historic 
civil rights lawsuit. The recent ruling raises 
hopes that at least some of the perpetrators 
and planners of the vile attack on Judi and 
Darryl will be exposed. 

Send tax-deductible donations to Red- 
wood Justice Fund PO Box 14720 Santa 
Rosa CA 95402. 

www.Suprise! 

Investors seeking information about 
Mexican government finances on the In- 
ternet got a surprise Feb. 6 after Zapatista 
rebels hacked into the world wide web 
home page of the Mexican Treasury De- 
partment. Instead of financial statistics on 
how to further exploit workers and 
campesinos, they found a message from 
Subcomandante Marcos portrayed against 
a background of Emiliano Zapata. The 
embarrassed government quickly restored 
the page. 

Jericho ‘98 March 

WASHINGTON DC— 5,000 people 
from across North America assembled here 
March 27 for Jericho ’98, a day of protest 
in support of U.S: political prisoners. The 
demonstration marched to the White House 
led by large puppets and included an anar- 
chist contingent of 500. It was a colorful 
parade, with black and black and red flags 
flying along side the African tri-color. 
The event was totally ignored by the me- 
dia even though it was larger than a simi- 
lar march held here in February to oppose 
U.S. aggression in Iraq. — Chucko 



The Fifth Estate is a cooperative, 
nonprofit project, publishing since 
1965. The people who produce it are 
a group of friends who do so neither 
to secure wages nor as an investment 
in the newspaper industry, but to 
encourage resistance to an unjust 
and destructive society. 



The Fifth Estate (ISSN No. 0015-0800) 
is published quarterly at 4632 Sec- 
ond Ave., Detroit, Michigan 48201 
USA: Phone (313) 831-6800. Our of- 
fice hours vary, so please call before 
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No paid advertisements. 

Postmaster: Send address changes 
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Detroit MI 48201 USA. 


PAGE 2 


FIFTH ESTATE SUMMER 1998 




Clinton’s Penis Attacks Hussein 

From Russia 
With Love 

by Comrade AKAI-47 

MOSCOW — Sometimes I wonder who 
has more sexual hang-ups: Moscow anar- 
chists or Bill Clinton? Only serious per- 
verts can truly understand Clinton’s con- 
flict with Iraq as more than the quest for 
domination; it’s penis envy of 
Zhirinovskyesque proportions, the subli- 
mated sexual aggression of two presidents 
played out on the world political stage. 

Every day the saga of Blow Me Bill 
unravels, revealing new dimensions in the 
psycho-sexual. We ponder the myriad so- 
cial implications in the unfolding drama: 
perversion and harassment, power and lust, 
the insistent shock of the press. And, think 
of Saddam, the misogynist creep, with his 
something to prove, his hatred of opposi- 
tion, and his rejection of the free-loving 
Italian porno-politician Cicciolina — a sure 
sign that he can’t get it up unless a chick’s 
in a veil. 

With such rich, fairy tale subject mat- 
ter, we set out to protest against the threat 
of war in Iraq, against the sublimated 
sexual aggression of presidents the world 
over, against the role of media prostitutes 
(“journalists”), surrogate sexual voyeur- 
ism via pseudo-scandals, bourgeois mo- 
rality — for free love and a world without 
rockets, presidents and the Moral Major- 
ity. 

The name of the action, simply: MAKE 
LOVE NOT WAR. 

The initial idea was for an artistic rep- 
resentation of the problem as we saw it: 
one dimensional figures of Clinton, 
Hussein and Monica Lewinsky with her 
face cut out — the symbolic everywoman, 
sexual body, any brain will do-put your- 
self in her place. Clinton and Hussein had 
moveable penises shaped as rockets that 
shot out fireworks; a separate hand-held 
papier mache penis ejaculated at each shot. 

More and more individuals with group 
complexes joined up: The Fighting Ama- 
zons/Direct Action Group; The Moscow 
Committee for Sexual Revolution; the 
Emma Goldman Dancing Brigade; The 
No-Limits Journalist Association; the 
Sigmund Freud Family Circle; the Union 
of Offended Secretaries; the Alexandra 
Kollantai and Princess Diana Groups of 
the “No Shame Society”; The Initiative 
for video cameras in Presidential Cham- 
bers; and the Moscow Section of the 
American-Iraqi Friendship Society. 
Enough for proper street theater. 

On March 7, our theater action took 
place outside the American Embassy in 
Moscow. Among those represented were 
Bill, Monica and Saddam, Bill’s Penis (a 
boy in a plastic bag, complete with bal- 
loon balls), the 6th Fleet, a harem, the 
press, Sigmund Freud and a storyteller. 

Bill’s Penis was very well played, get- 
ting hard, getting soft, desperately harass- 
ing women and aggressively attacking 
Hussein. Bill himself was busy 
sloganeering cliches such as, “More 
Women in the White House.” Millions of 
TV viewers across Russia got an unusu- 
ally long look at the action, but, keeping 
true to soft-pom traditions, they didn’t 
show any dick! And Monica in drag sent 
out memorable wishes of the day to the 
women of Russia on the upcoming 
Women’s Day holiday.* 



“Smart Bomb” — graphic by Richard Mock 


The Empire’s War Was 
Averted— What Win We 
Do about the “Peace”? 

war we are warned of today already oc- 
curred in 1 99 1 , as U.S./U.N. terror bomb- 
ing obliterated Iraqi civilian infrastruc- 
tures, particularly the electrical and water 
treatment systems, and the civilian popu- 
lation succumbed as surely as it would 
have under the onslaught of biological 
warheads. Furthermore, another round of 
bombing would have done nothing to im- 
pede Saddam Hussein’s production of 
chemical and biological weapons — the 
“poor man’s nuclear arsenal” — but rather 
would only have bounced the rubble 
around, while completely devastating what 
tenuous humanitarian assistance remains. 
Still, the U.S. was interested in flexing 
imperial muscle if for no other reason than 
to test new weapons such as the military’s 
5,000 pound “deep penetrator” bombs and 
its allegedly improved, so-called smart 
weapons. 

As we write, hundreds more children 
are dying in Iraq, thousands more starve 
and are sickened, schools close, and fami- 
lies are forced to sell their belongings and 
sometimes their bodies in order to sur- 
vive. Such suffering mostly goes unno- 
ticed, a detail in history without a museum 
to honor its victims. Things have gotten so 
bad for the Iraqis that in the weeks leading 
up to possible air strikes, very few people 
bothered to fortify houses or stockpile 
what meager resources could be found; 
some have told Western journalists that 
they wish the Americans would bomb them 
once and for all and put them out of their 
misery. But Iraqi misery is just an extreme 
example of conditions that are becoming a 
grim fact of life for growing numbers of 
people under global capitalism. 

During the same period in the U.S., 
millions have returned again and again to 
movie theaters to see the most expensive 
film ever produced, the technological ex- 
travaganza Titanic. As Iraqis sit on their 
doorsteps waiting for the bombs to fall, 
Americans thrill to the spectacle of catas- 
trophe, wavering between an aestheticized, 
luxurious sense of passive surrender and 


by Ali Moossavi and David Watson 

B y last count, 1 .5 million Iraqis, one 
million of them children under five, 
have died as a result of the U.S./U.N. 
sanctions, either through starvation or from 
lack of medicine for easily curable diseases. 
People are dying at a rate of about 1 1 ,000 a 
month, and some four million more are on 
the verge of starvation. In the seven years 
since the 1991 Gulf War’s intense and dev- 
astating bombing campaign, Iraq has become 
the international oil economy’s extermina- 
tion camp. 

Throughout history empires have gen- 
erally improved upon their predecessors’ 
methods of mass murder; old fashioned 
siege and starvation, however, persist. 
Despite Clinton’s recent threats to save 
Iraq by bombing it, none of his death 
technology can match the grisly conse- 
quences of the sanctions. People cannot 
avoid sanctions by hiding in a bomb shel- 
ter, or escape hunger in a bombed-out 
school, or narrowly avoid cholera in a 
forest. One needn’t be sympathetic to the 
Iraqi despots to agree with the Iraqi for- 
eign minister’s comment that the sanc- 
tions themselves are weapons of mass 
destruction. 

One is reminded of the Irish famine of 
1845-51. The failure of the Irish potato 
crop was by no means the result of a 
conscious conspiracy, but the British used 
it as a weapon to force submission on a 
rebellious nation. Ultimately, the contin- 
ued forced requisitioning of crops, mass 
emigration and mass evictions had a pre- 
dictable outcome: more than a million 
people lost their lives to disease and star- 
vation — about the same number in almost 
the same length of time the U.N. sanctions 
have done their work in Iraq. American 
history provides other instances of starva- 
tion and disease as weapons of conquest, 
not least the mass depopulation of this 
continent of those who found themselves 
in the way of Manifest Destiny. 

Ironically, the biological and chemical 


an anxious, vicarious, privatized struggle 
for survival. For some, mass death is a 
reality; for others, succumbing to what 
one pundit has called “weapons of mass 
distraction,” it’s still only a Saturday 
evening’s entertainment. 

As the global megatechnic war-and- 
work machine chugs along, reeling from 
crisis to crisis, one can only wonder when 
and where the next scandal, collapse, or 
military conflict will suddenly appear. 
Whatever we'may accomplish, how we 
respond to Capital’s war-^and its 
“peace” — means everything in defining 
who, and what, we are. 

Let us gather our own meager resources 
and take a stand against all empires, as 
they drive humanity’s frail ship deeper 
into the night.* 

Clinton 
Threatened 
Nukes in Gulf 

by Bill Weinberg 

A mid all the media saturation about oral 
sex in the Oval Office, it went almost 
unnoticed that Bill Clinton considered use 
of nuclear weapons against Iraq to take out 
Saddam Hussein’s underground complexes, 
or to retaliate for an Iraqi chemical or bio- 
logical attack by issuing Presidential Policy 
Directive 60 (PPD 60). 

Following a brief flicker of media cov- 
erage of this battlefield contingency order 
in early February, Russian President Boris 
Yeltsin warned that escalation in the Per- 
sian Gulf could lead to World War III. 
This was portrayed in the U.S. press as 
irresponsible alarmism. PPD 60 is already 
down the memory hole. 

Threatening nuclear strikes to fight 
weapons of mass destruction is a concept 
straight out of Orwell. Hussein is not “this 
generation’s Hitler.” Like Noriega, he is a 
U.S.-groomed client gone bad. His gas- 
sing of the Kurds at Halabja in 1988, a 
clearly genocidal act, occurred when he 
was still a U.S. asset. (A Congressional 
bill calling for sanctions in the wake of 
that atrocity never made it out of Con- 
gress.) 

True to the principles of doublethink, 
Americans remain blind to Desert Storm’s 
400,000 civilian casualties in 199 1 , or the 
fact that the holocaust of Schwartzkof & 
Co. dwarfed Iraqi atrocities and environ- 
mental terrorism in Kuwait. 

Where are the voices pointing out that 
Clinton crossed a dangerous threshold — 
the normalization of nuclear warfare? Per- 
haps the citizens are more interested in 
sex scandals and sports as the world takes 
a step closer to its end. The war drive this 
time elicited neither jingoistic approval 
nor outraged protest. It provoked mostly 
our indifference — one more spectacular 
titillation in a world dominated by the 
media. 

What was “unthinkable” during most 
of the Cold War — since it assumed a 20- 
. minute nuclear war that would leave the 
Earth in cinders — has now become think- 
able. Today’s “tactical” nukes — the kind 
fitted onto a Cruise missile for use against 
an Iraqi bunker;— deliver the kind of punch 
that wiped out Hiroshima. After use of 
tactical or battlefield nukes, the next 
threshold in the acceptable level of global 
violence is strategic nukes. 

Clinton’s nuclear threat brings us a 
step closer to the earth in cinders.* 


SUMMER 1998 FIFTH ESTATE 


PAGE 3 


Will Success Spoil 
Chumbawamba? 

Continued from page 1 


tion and insists that their intent remains 
unchanged. “We don’t want to just get our 
pop music into people’s homes,” she says. 
“We want to get anarchist ideas along 
with it.” 

Although there is little on their current 
album to overtly suggest this perspective, 
band members say thi s wasn ’ t a marked n g 
strategy. They had completed the album a 
year before signing with EMI in Britain 
after being dumped by their independent 
label which advised the band to “Take a 
year off and write stronger songs.” 

Pointing to an earlier recording, Nutter 
says, “If you look at our album, ‘Pictures 
of Starving Children,’ the way those songs 
are written, they’re just theses. Each song 
has at least 32-lines, none of them re- 
peated, and no chorus, because we were 
trying to get in as many words as pos- 
sible.” She says they wanted to do music 
with “choruses and hook lines, and were 
constructed like ordinary pop songs.” 
Nutter says the band decided if they wanted 
to “really touch people,” they had to “put 
the theses somewhere else.” 

Unfortunately, with the U.S. release of 
“Tubthumper” on Universal, only half of 
their equation worked. They’ve got their 
top-of-the-charts music on MTV, on 
kareoke machines and at sporting events, 
but most people, like the prepubescent 
kids at Clutch Cargo’s, were clueless as to 
the “theses” that ultimately animate Chum- 
bawamba. An ad for a record chain in a 
local Detroit paper informed potential 
buyers that “this was the group’s eighth 
album. Previously known for their politi- 
cally charged lyrics, they toned down the 
social commentary just a bit on this al- 
bum.” 

Anarchist Spin 

The “somewhere else” for the theses 
mentioned above was supposed to be the 
latest album’s liner notes. The band spent 
months finding quotes from historic and 
contemporary radical figures that would 
give an anarchist spin to words which in 
themselves don’t directly convey that 
message. These were contained in a thick 
booklet accompanying the CD in its Euro- 
pean and Asian release. However, 
Universal’s American lawyers threw up a 
roadblock demanding a clearance on each 
quote. This would have delayed the debut 
of the album for months and left the band 
in an untenable position — a further wait 
for its release or an expurgated version. 
They chose the latter. 

“Maybe we could understand about a 
quote from Orwell,” Nutter says angrily, 
“but do you have to get clearance on own- 
ership of anonymous graffiti taken from a 
wall in Paris in 1968?” She expresses 
frustration about how the album appears 
without the liner notes: “People in Europe 
and Asia got the album we wanted; in 
America they didn’t. The last thing in the 
world we are is lap liberals; we’re anar- 
chists.” 

Following the lyrics of each song in the 
truncated booklet that appears with the 
American release is an invitation for people 
to write or e-mail the band for the missing 
quotes. 

Of course, the debate about what con- 
stitutes “selling-out” is a complicated one, 
and hardly new to rock and roll. Obvious 
examples, from the early ‘70s include 


Detroit’s seminal rock band, the MC5 and 
folksinger/anti-war activist Phil Ochs, 
whose efforts to reach wider audiences 
with a reduced social message failed mis- 
erably. Although groups such as the Clash 
and Gang of Four achieved mainstream 
success through innocuous hit songs, they 
soon self-destructed over the dilemma of 
how to keep radical politics intact. 

The band’s milder lyrics, instant fame, 
and decision to sign with a major label 
aren’t without critics in the radical move- 
ment from where Chumbawamba sprang. 
Class War, a militant British anarchist 
organization and newspaper denounced 
the band on their web site 
(www.angelfire.com)for 
Chumbawamba’ s decision to sign with 
EMI, a multinational media conglomerate 
and military contractor. 

Commenting on bands signing with 
major labels prior to her group’s contract 
with EMI, Class War quotes Nutter as 
saying in an interview, “I’ve too often 
heard rebel bands excuse their participa- 
tion with big business by saying ‘we’ll get 
across to more people.’ I’d be interested to 
discover exactly what they’ll get across 
and to whom. Turning rebellion into cash 
so dilutes the content of what they’re say- 
ing that I no longer think that they’re 
saying anything.” 

There are obvious contradictions be- 
tween a band that aspires to revolution and 
a corporation which seeks advantage in 
the international capitalist market place. 
AK Press pressed 7000 copies of Chumba’s 
“Showtime” CD, but “Tubthumper” will 
probably top out at quadruple platinum 
and only a corporation can do the world- 



Nor to rtertrioM flecoRp v\sr*o. 





L ess i 

OtAiaJickiM. /.dxAl 
to 


album’s songs as threaded together, the 
themes by themselves don’t seem to por- 
tray more than a protest against the ano- 
nymity and falseness of modern society. 
“One by One,” does indict bureaucratic 
labor leaders and “Scapegoat” criticizes 
blaming others, but as the band laments, 
they could easily come off as “lap liber- 
als” when the music stands by itself. 

Nutter’s criticism of their previous mu- 
sic seems curious. Many of their older 
tunes such as “Never Do What You Are 
Told,” “That’s How Grateful We Are,” 
and “Homophobia,” had the hooks and 
choruses she mentions approvingly. Their 
“I Never Gave Up” is an earlier 
“Tubthumping,” with a similar theme—/ 
crawled in the mud, but I never gave up — 
not stated quite as elegantly, but certainly 
with a memorable chorus. 

To their credit, the band seems intent 
on using their fame to promote anarchist 
ideas. After a U.S. tour in late 1997, they 
headed back to England to do a series of 
benefits for several rape crisis centers and 
anti-fascist groups. “We were influenced 
by bands like Crass with the idea pop 
music could be intensely political,” Nutter 
recalls. “They introduced us to the idea 
that songs didn’t have to be about love, 
and they called themselves anarchist. 
Chumbawamba doesn’t want to be just a 
pop group. We also want to be part of a 
radical community away from music be- 
cause real life is more exciting than a rock 
and roll circus.” 

As to the question of success affecting 
them, she says, “As soon as it starts to 
spoil us, we have to give up what we’re 
doing.” Asked about the band’s future 
plans, “To be in ‘Home Alone 4,’” Nutter 
jokes. 

Note: The suppressed liner notes are 
available from Chumbawamba, PO Box 
TR666, Leeds LSI 2 3XJ, UK or at 
www.chumba.com. “Showtime” can be 
ordered from Fifth Estate Books. 


wide distribution necessary for this sort of 
demand. 

Musically there’s not much to distin- 
guish “Tubthumper” from their recent al- 
bums, but lyrics needing supporting quotes 
or explanations to achieve the radical thrust 
the group desires'suggest an inherent weak- 
ness. Although the band sees the new 


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PftofOOHDiY AFF6CT6P 


Chumba Soaks Brit Deputy PM 

Chumbawamba made international news Feb. 9 when two of their members 
poured a bucket of ice water over the head of the British Deputy Prime 
Minister, John Prescott, at a posh music awards dinner. The action received 
extensive press and TV coverage. The following is a report we received from 
Chumbawamba. 

We’d already spent part of the evening trying to get passes for people 
outside who were protesting against the treatment of workers by Polygram, a 
record company employing people at practically slave labour rates in the UK. 
Security with bow-ties and red faces were scanning the seated arena for any 
sign of trouble. Walkie-talkies were spitting and crackling. [Chumbawamba’s] 
Danbert and Alice decided to have a quiet word with Mr. Prescott and his 
party, bent on steering the conversation around to New Labour’s despicable 
treatment of 500 sacked Liverpool dockworkers. 

The bucket of iced water at Prescott’s feet was too tempting. Taking his cue 
from the infamous custard-pie attacker in Belgium who recently covered the 
visiting Bill Gates in yellow goo, Danbert carefully aimed the whole thing at 
our Great Leader’s Understudy and saying, “This is for the Liverpool dock- 
ers,” poured the whole lot over his New Labour suit. 

Danbert was immediately seized by security and led away by cops. Mass 
panic everywhere. Head plain-clothes cop seeing his Head Of Security promo- 
tion going down the drain. People laughing. Cops not knowing what to do. 
“What's your name? Who are you with?” Prescott decided not to press 
charges in order to avoid the debacle of a court case where the second-highest 
political figure in the country tries to sue someone for wetting his suit. 

The next morning we wrote a press release to explain why the Deputy prime 
Minister had been “attacked.” It stated in part: 

“This wanton act of agit-prop is dedicated to single mothers, sacked 
dockworkers, people being forced into workfare, people who will be denied 
legal aid, students who will be denied the free education that the whole Labour 
front bench benefited from, the homeless, and all of the underclass who are 
now suffering at the hands of the Labour government.” 


PAGE 4 


FIFTH ESTATE SUMMER 1998 




Free The Gandalf Defendants 
Green Anarchist Editors Imprisone< 


illustration/Sean 


A fter a long and expensive campaign 
against Britain’s growing animal and 
earth liberation movements, three 
editors of the Green Anarchist (GA) maga- 
zine have been convicted for the crime of 
publishing reports of economic sabotage. 

In early 1995, England’s notorious se- 
cret police, the Special Branch, formed 
the Anim al Rights National Index (ARNI), 
a division created specifically to squelch 
direct actions by earth/animal activists. 
Once in operation, the squad launched a 
series of 55 raids throughout the country. 

The threat posed by the cooperation of 
these movements in carrying out numer- 
ous high profile actions in defense of the 
earth and animals was considered so seri- 
ous by the authorities that at one point as 
many as 60 cops comprised the ARNI 
squad. 

However, even after the numerous raids 
harassment, the police activity resulted 
only in the prosecution of four GA editors, 
an Animal Liberation Front (ALF) press 
officer and the newsletter editor of the 
ALF Supporters Group ALFSG. They are 
known together as the Gandalf Defen- 
dants from GA aND ALF. 

Using the content of news articles of 
ecotage and militant defense of animals 
appearing in the publications, the six were 
charged with “conspiring together to in- 
cite persons unknown to commit criminal 
damage.” 

Although those arrested never met be- 
fore their trial and no actual criminal dam- 
age was shown to have been committed as 
a result of reading GA or the ALFSG 
newsletter, the State needed (according to 
its warped justice system) only to demon- 
strate that the defendants “supported such 
actions and therefore wished them to oc- 
cur.” In an English so-called “conspiracy 
to incite” case, it is the responsibility of 
those facing prosecution to show that they 
did not intend to incite anyone. 

The trial of Steve Booth, Sax Wood, 
Noel Molland, and Simon Russell ended 
Nov. 12, when a jury returned a guilty 
verdict for GA editors Booth, Wood and 
Molland. Russell, the former editor of the 
AFLSG-UK newsletter was found not 
guilty. Paul Rodgers, GA’s general editor, 
was severed from the Gandalf trial when 
his barrister resigned and Robin Webb, 
the ALF press officer, was released before 
trial on a technicality but still faces charges. 

Presiding Judge David Selwood sen- 
tenced the defendants to three years in 
prison. 

The trial is estimated to have cost the 
government two million pounds to con- 
duct, with the investigation, “Operation 
Washington,” which lead to the arrests, 
costing a similar sum. This is $6.5 million 
in U.S. dollars. 

However, the high cost of the police 
work and trial did not insure its quality. 
According to observers at the hearing. 
Judge Selwood was visibly drunk during 
most of the proceedings and had to be 
reminded constantly of the defendants’ 
names. At one point, he openly declared 
from the bench “he thought the defendants 
were guilty,” according to Wood’s barris- 
ter. A key witness for the defense, Darren 
Thurston, a North American ALF activist, 
was deported from the U.K. before being 
allowed to testify that it was he and not 


Simon Russell who had put a report on the 
Internet about the Justice Department (a 
covert, militant animal rights group). 

Readers of this newspaper know this is 
not an isolated case of injustice. The inde- 
pendent press is. often the last bastion of 
rebellious voices against the total domi- 
nation of the planet by the economic and 
political megamachine. (See article be- 
low). These convictions, coming on the 
heels of the infamous McLibel trial, have 
ominous implications for movements ad- 
vocating revolutionary change. The En- 
glish government is trying to criminalize a 
whole range of beliefs to safeguard the 
corporate interests it represents. Formal 
guarantee of press freedom easily evapo- 
rates when publications challenge the rul- 
ing order. 

If the mere act of publishing reports 
describing acts of ecotage and similar revo- 
lutionary thrusts can successfully be 
criminalized, how much more difficult 
will our work be? For instance, under the 
logic of the Gandalf case, if Ted Kaczyn- 
ski could have been shown to have read 
the Fifth Estate and the Earth First! Jour- 
nal before his Unabomber attacks, their 
writers and editors would be subject to 
prosecution. The Fifth Estate has fre- 


quently reported on (and 
“supported such actions 
and therefore wishing 
them to occur”) a num- 
ber of militant green ac- 
tions in the U.K. such as 
road-ripping parties, 
ecotage, and anti-road 
campaigns. In England, 
we’d be in jail. i. 

And, let’s be direct: 
when we publish articles 
about ectoage and revo- 
lution, we intend to en- 
courage people to do what 
is necessary to defend the 
earth and to protect its 
beings from the ravages 
ofecocidal industrialism, 
multi-national corpora- 
tions, and repressive gov- 
ernments. 

Those who count 
themselves as enemies of 
the State and friends of the natural world 
should rally support for the success of the 
Gandalf Defendants’ appeal and to prove 
our movement is strong enough to with- 
stand this repression. 

For more information about the case 


and how you can help the defendants, 
contact: Gandalf Defendants Campaign, 
Box 66, Stevenage, SGI 2TR, England. 
See Page 21 for their addresses. — Maya 


Message from Marcos 

liiiil -ixiii 'ill 3 Mln-f'lfMw-svv 


r p i • i .y r : 


The following is from a translated 
text of a videotaped message from 
Subcomandante Marcos, spokesper- 
son for Mexico’s Zapatista National 
Liberation Front, to a January 1997 
Freeing the Media teach-in in New 
York City. 

W e’re in the mountains of southeast 
Mexico, in the Lacandon Jungle of 
Chiapas, and we want to send a greeting 
to our brothers and sisters in independent 
communication media from the U.S. and 
Canada. 

A global decomposition is taking 
place that we call the Fourth World 
War: neoliberalism, a global process to 
eliminate that multitude of people who 
are not useful to the powerful — the 
groups called “minorities” in the math- 
ematics of power, but who happen to be 
the majority population in the world. 

We find ourselves in a world system 
of globalization willing to sacrifice mil- 
lions of human beings. The giant com- 
munication media, the great monsters 
of the television industry, the commu- 
nication satellites, magazines and news- 
papers, seem determined to present a 
virtual world, created in the image of 
what the globalization process requires. 

In this sense, the world of contem- 
porary news is a world that exists for 
the VIPs. These major movie stars and 
big politicians, their everyday lives are 
what is important: if they get married, 
if they divorce, if they eat, what clothes 
they wear, or what clothes they take 
off. But common people only appear 
for a moment — when they kill some- 


one, of when they die. This can’t go on; 
sooner or later this virtual world clashes 
with the real world. And that is actually 
happening: This clash results in rebellion 
and war through out the entire world. 

We have a choice: We can have a cyni- 
cal attitude in the face of the media, to say 
that nothing can be done about the dollar 
power that creates itself in images, words, 
digital communication and computer sys- 
tems, that invades not just with an inva- 
sion of power, but with a way of seeing the 
world, of how it thinks the world should 
look. We could say, well, that’s the way it 
is, and do nothing. Or we can simply 
assume incredulity: We can say that any 
communication by the media monopolies 
is a total lie. We can ignore it and go about 
our lives. 

Tell The History 

But there is a third option that is neither 
conformity nor disbelief: That is to con- 
struct a different way — to show the world 
what is really happening — to have a criti- 
cal world view and to become interested 
in the truth of what happens to the people 
who inhabit every corner of this world. 

The work of independent media is to 
tell the history of social struggle in the 
world, and here in North America — the 
U.S., Canada and Mexico. Independent 
media have, on occasion, been able to 
open spaces even within the mass media 
monopolies: to force them to acknowl- 
edge news of other social movements. The 
problem is not only to know what is occur- 
ring in the world, but to understand it and 
to derive lessons from it — just as if we 
were studying history — a history not of 


the past, but a history of what is hap- 
pening at any given moment in what- 
ever part of the world. This is the way to 
learn who we are, what it is we want, 
who we can be and what we can or 
cannot do. 

By not having to answer to the mon- 
ster media monopolies, the indepen- 
dent media have a life work, a political 
project and purpose: to let the truth be 
known. This is more and more impor- 
tant in the globalization process. This 
truth becomes a knot of resistance 
against the lie. It is our only possibility 
to save the truth, to maintain it and 
distribute it, little by little, just as the 
books were saved in Fahrenheit 451 — 
in which a group of people dedicated 
themselves to memorize books, to save 
them from being destroyed, so that the 
ideas would not be lost. 

In this same way, independent me- 
dia try to save history: the present his- 
tory — saving it and trying to share it, so 
it will not disappear; moreover, to dis- 
tribute it to other places, so that this 
history is not limited to one country, to 
one region, to one city or social group. 
It is necessary not only for independent 
voices to exchange information and to 
broaden the channels, but to resist the 
spreading lies of monopolies. 

In August 1996, we called for the 
creation of a network of independent 
media, a network of information. We 
mean a network to resist the power of 
the lie that sells us the Fourth World 
War. We need this network not only as 
a tool for our social movements, but for 
our lives. 


SUMMER 1998 FIFTH ESTATE 


PAGE 5 



Detroit Seen 


W elcome to our Summer 1998 edition. 

Thanks to everyone who had a hand 
in creating our 351st issue. This issue fol- 
lows our Fall 1997 edition, so please note 
that there was not an issue designated Win- 
ter or Spring. 

As always, you can keep track of issues 
by noting the number in parentheses. Sub- 
scriptions expire after you have received 
four issues, not a calendar year. Special 
thanks to our Sustainers and to those who 
made generous donations with their sub- 
scription renewals. Also, to our writers 
and artists whose works grace our pages. 

A pparently we gloated too soon about the 
imprisonment of Larry Nevers (See Fall 
1997 FE). The Detroit killer cop bitterly 
complained about there not being enough 
“white people with spines” after two Michi- 
gan courts refused to overturn his convic- 
tion for the 1992 brutal beating death of 
Malice Green, a black, unemployed steel- 
worker. Green died after receiving over a 
dozen blows to the head with a two-pound 
flashlight from the two cops after he was 
stopped in an inner city neighborhood. 

But Nevers finally got his wish. In a 
decision marked by blatant favoritism and 
obvious racism, Reagan-appointed Fed- 
eral District Judge Lawrence Zatkoff freed 
Nevers declaring the predominantly black 
jury was unduly influenced by several 
outside factors including watching the film 
“Malcolm X” during a break in testimony. 
Nevers’ partner, Walter Budzyn, was con- 
victed in a second trial. 

A Michigan appeals court and the state 
supreme court both held that the evidence 
against Nevers, who has a long history of 
brutalizing and killing black residents, 
was so overwhelming that viewing, the 
film did not have a determinative effect on 
the jury. But outside influences appear to 
have had a strong effect on the judge. 
Zatkoff is pals with officials from the 
arch-conservative Macomb County Re- 
publican Party who constitute the back- 
bone of the Nevers suburban-based de- 
fense committee. 

From the moment the case was brought 
to Zatkoff, the fix was in. In a highly 
unusual rpove, he ordered the case as- 
signed to him rather than select a judge by 
normal procedures. Zatkoff sped the case 
through the docket three times faster than 
usual and presented an 88-page decision 
only 11 days after the prosecution’s an- 
swer, minutes before the close of court for 
the New Years’ holiday. It seems clear the 
judge wrote his brief prior to hearing the 
arguments. 

Zatkoff took off his black robe and 
donned a white one to join the lynch mob 
who are horrified that a cop, even one with 
a brutal history, can be punished for kill- 
ing an African-American. You can hear 
the racist mentality of Never’s supporters 
on local right-wing talk radio as they ve- 
hemently denounce Malice Green as a 
“crack-head” and “low-life,” as if this 
alone is grounds for execution at the hands 
of a cop death squad. 

There’s a homemade memorial at the 
corner of Warren Ave. and 23rd where 
Nevers bludgeoned the small, unresisting 
Green to death by 14 blows to the head 
with his two-pound flashlight. People from 


all over come to pay their respects to a 
man considered a martyr by many in the 
community. They know Malice Green was 
not the first black person to die at the 
hands of racist cops, and they’re afraid he 
won’t be the last. 

The centerpiece of the memorial is a 
mural painted on the side of an abandoned 
building by local artist Bennie White 
Ethiopia depicting a christ-like Green. Two 
days after Nevers was welcomed home 
from four years in a Texas federal pen, 
someone vandalized the painting with a 
swastika and the words, “Nevers Rules.” 

While Ethiopia quickly repaired the 
damage, the killer and his friends, all 
“white people with spines,” were celebrat- 
ing Judge Zatkoff’ s decision . 

A Wayne County Circuit Court jury hear- 
ing the retrial of fired cop Walter 
Budzyn brought in a verdict of guilty of in- 
voluntary manslaughter, March 9, for his role 
in the beating death of Malice Green. Al- 
though convicted on a lesser charge then the 
original one of second degree murder, this 
second trial cut the ground out from under 
the racist contention that the two cops were 
victims of reverse racism by a vengeful, pre- 
dominately African-American jury. 

Following Budzyn’s conviction, racist 
state legislators abolished Detroit’s 135- 
year-old mostly black city court system in 
retaliation for its effrontery of convicting 
Nevers and Budzyn. 

However, the beating death of Green 
was so egregious, that the predominately 
white county jury also brought in a verdict 
clearly condemning Budzyn. 

W hen retired Detroit Mayor Coleman 
Young died of emphysema at age 78 
last winter, he was buried with ceremonies 
fit for a pharaoh. 

Young held office from 1974 to 1993, 
the era when Detroit cemented its identity 
as ground zero of the rust belt. After forty 


false promise of industrial capitalism. 

A flamboyant, witty, charming despot, 
tremendously corrupted by the trappings 
of power. Young cruised the city in an 
armor-plated limousine, surrounded by 
Uzi-toting guards. His lifestyle combined 
the proclivities of Howard Hughes and 
Hugh Hefner. 

Young sometimes holed up in his city- 
owned mansion on the Detroit River for 
weeks at a time, sleeping by day, playing 
solitaire dressed in pajamas by night in 
front of a glowing, big-screen TV. He 
dated women who worked for him, and 
fathered a child when he was 64 with the 
34-year-old assistant director of the De- 
partment of Public Works. 

With the city 80 percent black and the 
suburbs 90 percent white, metro Detroit is 
one of the nation’s most segregated areas. 
Young was a polarizing figure. Black 
Detroiters generally admired him for his 
outspoken civil rights activism in his 
younger days and for attempting, in his 
own way as mayor, to rebuild Detroit, 
which had lost 400,000 residents in the 
twenty years before he took office. More 
than 90,000 people filed past his casket 
during the two days it was on view, and 
thousands more lined the route of his fu- 
neral procession, some of them waving or 
giving his passing hearse the black-power 
salute. 

Whites largely despised Young, blam- 
ing him for capital’s massive economic 
looting and abandonment of the central 
city, and because he was pugnacious and 
direct in challenging suburban racism. The 
level of irrational hatred against Young by 
whites was breathtaking. Racist comments 
and jokes were common, and few seemed 
to understand why black Detroiters re- 
acted so emotionally to his passing. 

While Young was provocative in dis- 
cussing race, he was not above using it to 
advance his career. He assailed anyone 
who dared to oppose him as an “Uncle 
Tom,” and once called an opponent whom 
he had accused of catering to whites “an 
important first in American politics — a 
black white hope.” Local community ac- 
tivists, for example people who fought 
Detroit trash incinerator (aptly dubbed 
“Coleman’s Cathedral”), typically 


Part of ex-Detroit Mayor Coleman Young’s legacy is his destruction of a working 
class district for a Cadillac plant and bulldozing (above) of artist Tyree Guyton’s 
Heidleberg Project of found art which covered several blocks. — photo/Sunfrog 


years of flight by the automakers, other 
manufacturers and hundreds of thousands 
of residents, the once heralded “Arsenal 
of Democracy” by the end of Young’s 
reign had the highest poverty rate in urban 
America and was scruffy testimony to the 


themselves taunted by Young and his 
machine’s footsoldiers to go back to the 
suburbs. 

Young came out of the labor move- 
ment, and FBI files indicate he was fol- 
lowed, harassed and blacklisted for his 


radical activities before World War II. In 
1952, the House Committee on Un-Ameri- 
can Activities summoned him to discuss 
communism among black union militants. 
“You have me mixed up with a stool pi- 
geon,” Young told the committee, which 
had ruined the reputations of countless 
people in its search for fellow travelers. 
Young boldly defied committee members, 
some of them Southerners, lecturing them 
on the proper pronunciation of “Negro” 
and refusing to answer their questions. “I 
am fighting against un-American activi- 
ties such as lynchings and denial of the 
vote,” Young declared. 

Young’s daring effrontery to the Con- 
gressional witch hunters was so admired 
in the African-American community that 
his testimony was released on a 78 rpm 
record and became a fast seller in the 
city’s Black Bottom district. 

Young’s main method of resuscitating 
Detroit was to hand over tax breaks to 
wealthy corporations to build something, 
anything, to replace decrepit factories and 
homes left behind during decades of white 
flight. 

His most memorable project was to 
level Poletown, a neighborhood of 3,400 
working-class residents and hundreds of 
homes, shops and institutions, to make 
room for a General Motors luxury car 
plant. 

It was one of the largest, fastest and 
most brutal urban renewals in American 
history. The irony of a former radical 
destroying peoples’ homes for the world’s 
largest corporation was not lost on every- 
body. But the spectacle of a proud black 
man begging white-run firms for a few 
measly crumbs was representative of the 
ultimate tragedy of Coleman Young. 

T his yeaFmarks three decades since the 
publication of the late John Hersey ’s The 
Algiers Motel Incident. Hersey, the ac- 
claimed author of popular books such as 
Hiroshima and A Bell for Adano, came to 
Detroit shortly after the 1967 rebellion, so 
his investigation into the execution-style 
murders of three young African-American 
men in a sleazy motel attracted considerable 
attention. 

To mark the anniversary, the John 
Hopkins University Press has reissued the 
book, coincidentally just in time for Walter 
Budzyn’s retrial and conviction. 

In the rebellion, 43 people died and 
7,000 were arrested; it took the combined 
forces of police, state troopers. National 
Guard troops and the U.S. Army nearly a 
week to restore “order.” Hersey ’s book 
focussed on events at the Algiers Motel on 
July 26. Police and national guard troops 
raided the motel, ostensibly to hunt for 
snipers, though no guns were found. 

Inside, they lined up seven black men 
and two white women along a wall, strip- 
ping the women and viciously beating the 
men. The cops took the guests one by one 
into a room, and when the night was over, 
three of the men had been shot dead as 
they assumed what the medical examiner 
termed “nonaggressive postures.” The 
three white cops charged in the massacre 
were brought to an up-state venue tried by 
an all white jury and acquitted. 

While readers may differ with Hersey ’ s 
assertions that racism derives from the 
minds of people and not necessarily from 
a haywire social-economic system, the 
book is a fiery trip back in time, and 
questions who was really rioting during 
the tumultuous week the Motor City 
burned. 


PAGE 6 


FIFTH ESTATE SUMMER 1998 



How I 
Stopped 
Recycling & 
Learned to 
Love It 

by Peter Werbe 


Protesters at a 
1991 demonstra- 
tion at the 
world’s largest 
“trash-to- 
energy” 
incinerator 
located close to 
downtown 
Detroit in a 
predominately 
poor and minority 
district. It has 
been a constant 
source of 
pollutants and 
never produced 
the promised 
electricity. 

—photo/Rebecca 

Cook 


T he title of this article is somewhat mis- 
leading since I continue to recycle a 
portion of the waste produced daily 
by my household. What has changed is my 
previous diligence in making certain every 
scrap of what is recyclable winds up in my 
yellow curbside container. 

Now I use my recycle bin solely be- 
cause my trash has to be placed some- 
where for disposal. However, if I had to 
make any concerted effort at all, such as 
sorting or transporting my trash to some 
facility, I’m sure I wouldn’t bother. 

I realize even the headline is a provoca- 
tion to some people who see recycling as 
an important component in the campaign 
for a clean environment. However, the 
contention that this is an inadequate per- 
spective, leading eventually to the oppo- 
site of its intent, is nothing new to the Fifth 
Estate* 

Recycling is a classic case of co- 
optation by the reigning powers of genu- 
ine sentiment for reform. The idea of re- 
processing waste items was put forth as a 
good faith solution by those in the ecology 
movement who saw the damage being 
done to the environment by the detritus of 


Recycling is a classic 
case of co-optation 
of genuine sentiment 
for reform by the 
reigning powers. 


production and consumption. 

The 1 980s gave rise to the construction 
of a rash of huge incinerators, including 
one in Detroit. This monstrous facility, 
the world’s largest at the time of construc- 
tion, sits three miles from the downtown 
area, less than a mile from the homes of 
several FE staff members. This insane 
techno-fix (doesn’t everyone know burn- 
ing anything produces toxins?) has as its 
basis the idea that we can continue current 
waste levels without having to pay the 
consequences. 

Any sort of conservation or recycling is 


‘See my “Recycling & Liberal Reform,” in our 
1 990 Earth Day Special, an 8-page supple- 
ment, or in the Summer 1990 FE. Send $2 
for the latter; postage for the former. 


officially discouraged since these babies 
need all the fuel they can get, often to meet 
contract requirements with local utilities 
to produce electricity. Unfortunately for 
the environment and the people living in 
the immediate area (almost always poor 
and/or minority), these incinerators emit a 
deadly stream of dioxins, furans, and heavy 
metals into the air which assault our im- 
mune system. 

Even with all the evidence about toxic- 
ity levels emanating from incinerators, 
their fires remain stoked, and they con- 
tinue to produce toxic ash (as much as 30 
percent of what is burned needs to be 
buried in special landfills to contain their 
now-concentrated poisonous content) . 

Economically, incinerators are 
flatlining all over the country due to their 
inability to produce the electricity for 
which they contracted to utilities. At one 
Detroit area burner, the operating author- 
ity has set up a special marketing division 
to seek trash from surrounding munici- 
palities, and Canada if necessary, to meet 
its fuel needs. 

In contrast, recycling seems like a rea- 
sonable alternative, particularly since it 
doesn’t confront either our personal con- 
sumption level or society’s aggregate 
mess. The only demand is that people 
place recyclables in a separate bin, some- 
thing with which most good citizens were 
willing to comply even when not required 
by local ordinance. In municipalities where 
curbside recycling isn’t provided as a city 
service, many people willingly make trips 
to recycling centers with their sorted trash 
feeling “they’re at least doing something. ” 

However, the “something” is illusory. 
Landfills remain the major destination for 
the majority of household garbage and 
when) space runs out like it has in New 
York's Fishkill facility, the city contracts 
to have it shipped to sites in Virginia. 

A quick visual check in your neighbor- 
hood should illustrate that recycling isn’t 
significantly reducing the trash that will 
either be landfilled or incinerated. Esti- 
mate the volume in the non-recycled sec- 
tion of your trash or on your block com- 
pared to the relatively tiny amount in re- 
cycling containers. My box is filled maybe 
every two weeks, much of it with newspa- 
pers, but every week I set out one or two 
30 gallon garbage cans. And that’s with at 
least some consciousness on my part about 
waste, excessive consumption and the 
composting of all my vegetable matter. 

Mad Levels of Production 

Some people argue that if recycling is 
not effective it at least functions as a 
gesture and is an important element to- 
wards understanding individual responsi- 
bility for our mess. However, the notion 
that recycling is even a little better than 
nothing produces only more illusions, not 
environmental sanity. Mad levels of pro- 
duction and consumption are at the core of 
capitalist economies, and unless that pro- 
cess is confronted, little will change. 

To some extent this essay about indi- 
vidual disposal of household garbage 
should only be a footnote when talking 
about waste. Americans generate 8.5 bil- 
lion tons of waste yearly, but the vast 
majority — 98 percent — is from industrial 
and mining operations. The remaining two 
percent — 172 million — is from municipal 
sources. According to the Summer 1990 
Earth Island Journal, the latter totals out 
to an average of 1360 pounds per person 
yearly for households, but a whopping 3 1 
tons (!) for each of us from the major 


source's. 

The emphasis on household recycling 
functions as a diversion from examining 
the big sources of waste. A close look at 
the myths about recycling shows they are 
being perpetrated less by those committed 
to ecology and more by those doing the 
most damage to the planet. Even those 
active in administering recycling programs 
have come to recognize, for instance, that 
plastics consumption (an increasing per- 
centage of the waste stream) is actually 
encouraged by recycling. For that reason, 
th$ Berkeley Ecology Center (BEC) an- 
nounced in February 1996 that it would no 
longer accept plastics in the recycling pro- 
gram they administer for that California 
city. 

Though they don’t use it in production, 
the American Plastics Council, an indus- 
try group for virgin resin manufacturers 
(first-;time-use plastics) has been a relent- 
less promoter of plastics recycling. 
They’ye recently spent $18 million on 
public; relations as part of a propaganda 
campaign to change the long-standing 
perception of their product as harmful to 
the environment. 

From its inception, plastic has been a 
synonym for the false and insubstantial. 
The late Frank Zappa sang about “plastic 
people” and the obscenely whispered ad- 
vice to “The Graduate,” similarly was, 
“Plaaastics.” Unfortunately, the business- 
man in the 1967 film ultimately was cor- 
rect; the future did lie in that multi-use 
substance made from the oil for which the 
U.S. was willing to kill several hundred 
thousand Iraqis. The substitution of plas- 
tics for glass, wood and paper products 
has been so substantial that hardly anyone 
even notices. Any public event, a baseball 
gatne fof instance, produces massive 
amounts of plastic cups, plates and cutlery 
that have been used in some cases for only 
the seconds it takes to spill down ten 
ounces of beer before being consigned to 
a trash barrel. 

Toxic For Every Moment 

The cups arrive at the local landfill 
(they can’t be recycled), there to remain 
intact for hundreds of years, although their 
slow disintegration begins to release tox- 
ins. They began their ignominious jour- 
ney in an oil field thousands of miles away 
and were toxic every moment of their 
existence — from drilling to oceanic trans- 
portation, to off-loading at American har- 
bors to manufacture and finally to dis- 
posal. Plants that pump out benzene and 
vinyl chlorines, building blocks for a wide 
spectrum of plastics, produce 14 percent 
of U.S. toxic air emissions. Sixteen per- 
cent of all industrial accidents — explo- 
sions, toxic cloud releases, chemical spills 
and fires — involve plastic production. 
Recycling doesn’t touch this, but the spills 
and accidents aren’t what are featured in 
industry ads. 

Recycled plastic is a small percentage 
of what is manufactured and the amount is 
actually decreasing even as recycling in- 
creases. In 1993, for instance, 15 billion 
pounds of plastic were produced from what 
the industry calls virgin feed stock, but 
only one billion pounds of that was re- 
cycled. 

And, the “at least we’re doing some- 
thing” argument doesn’t work well here 
either. The industrial process which re- 
claims plastic is highly toxic and much of 
what is collected is shipped overseas, and 

Continued on page 31 


SUMMER 1998 FIFTH ESTATE 


PAGE 7 



Coming Events 

Building A Movement 


Chicago-May 3 

Honoring the 
Haymarket Martyrs 

The U.S. National Park Service has 
declared Chicago’s Haymarket Martyrs’ 
Monument a National Historic Landmark 
and the Illinois Labor History . Society 
(ILHS) is sponsoring a celebration, Sun- 
day afternoon. May 3. The ceremony will 
take place at the former Waldheim cem- 
etery now called Forest Home at 863 
Desplaines Ave. in Forest Park, 111. out- 
side of Chicago. 

The monument is a tribute to five anar- 
chists, Albert Parsons, August Spies, 
Adolph Fischer, George Engle and Louis 
Lingg, who died at the hands of the state of 
Illinois following a frame-up murder trial 
in 1 887. They were convicted for a bomb 
thrown during a police riot although none 
of the accused were ever shown to have 
been directly connected with the device. 
Much like the current British Gandalf 
Defendants (see p. 5), the Haymarket 
martyrs were held responsible by their 
writings and utterances for an act commit- 
ted by someone unknown to them. 

Although it seems quite a contradiction 
to have anarchists honored by a govern- 
ment agency, official designation may be 
for the best. Old Waldheim Cemetery, 
resting place of Emma Goldman and other 
radicals, had fallen on hard times recently. 
Security was so lax on the grounds that the 
Monument was vandalized and its elabo- 
rate brass trim stolen for scrap. 

Leslie Orear, president of the ILH^- 
said a sculptor and foundry are necessary 
to restore the missing filigree. He added 
that security has improved under the site’s 
new owners and he was hopeful a recon- 
stituted statue would be properly guarded. 

For information and directions contact 
the ILHS, 28 E. Jackson, Rm. 1012, Chi- 
cago IL 60604; 312-663^4107; 

www.kentlaw.edu/ilhs. 

Everywhere-May 16 

Global Street Party 

People in London and Turku, Finland 
have proposed Saturday, May 16 as the 
day for a Global Street Party. These events 
would coincide with the 1998 G8 meeting 
in Birmingham, England, where world 
leaders from the eight largest capitalist 
economies will make decisions about the 
future of the planet and its people. 

These politicians and corporate vam- 
pires, in their ceaseless drive for profit, 
will then fly to Geneva to celebrate the 
50th anniversary of GATT, where they 
will sign agreements enabling them to 
wrench more power and control away from 
local communities and siphon it into their 
self-appointed dictatorship. 

People everywhere are rebelling against 
these global forces, and mid-May will see 
countless world-wide protests. A 
transnational street party has the potential 
to be a defining moment of resistance. 
Imagine the kick of taking back your street 
in the knowledge that all over the world 
similar acts of defiance are taking place . 

Time is short, so please try to respond 
to this idea as soon as possible. London 
Reclaim The Streets, PO box 9656, Lon- 
don N4 4NL, UK; 0171-281-4621; 
www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/campaigns/rts.html. 


St. Louis- July 17-19 

Biotechnology 

Conference 

Several environmental groups are spon- 
soring the first grassroots gathering on 
biodevastation and genetic engineering, 
July 17-19, at Fontbonne College in St. 
Louis.- Organizers say the conference will 
address the intertwined issues of genetic 
engineering, patenting of life forms and 
herbicide-resistant seeds, world trade in 
genetic material, and the monopolization 
of food production. 

Bringing together major critics of bio- 
technology such as Indian physicist 
Vandana Shiva, author Brian Tokar, and 
Howard Lyman (co-defendant in the Oprah 
Winfrey case), the conference will host 
workshops and panels for environmental- 
ists, pure food activists, and farmers. 

For more information contact the Gate- 
way Green Alliance at (314) 727-8554 or 
(314) 772-6463. 

Toronto-Aug. 17-23 
Anarchist Gathering 
Set For August 

Toronto anarchists and radical activ- 
ists are organizing Active Resistance ‘98, 
August 17-23, designated as the ten-year 
anniversary of the Survival Gathering held 
in that city (see Summer 1988 FE for 
background). 

Canada is home to the second-largest 
community of Nazi war criminals in the 
world, and Toronto hafa' 'disproportionate 
share of boneheads and fascist propagan- 
dists. It also recently witnessed a brutal 
wave of police killings of people of color 
in a city which is heavily multi-cultural. 

The province of Ontario is rated the 
third most polluted area in North America, 
clearcut deforestation is rampant in the 
Temagami region, and the Darlington 
nuclear reactor was recently cited for in- 
competence. Campus occupations have 
taken place across the province by student 
activists frustrated with increasingly in- 
accessible tuition fees, and the Ontario 
Federation of Labor is poised for the pos- 
sibility of a province- wide general strike. 

The city is ripe for a creative, fun, 
culturally diverse, queer positive, Native- 
solidarity, pro-feminist, youth and politi- 
cal prisoner-friendly, labor-aligned, anti- 
poverty, ecologically-minded gathering of 
anarchist activists taking action against 
oppression in Toronto, North America, 
and the world. 

Send information requests, organizing 
and outreach ideas, workshop topics, 
fundraising suggestions, contact addresses 
to: Active Resistance ’98 Toronto Plan- 
ning Crew / P.O. Box 108 Station P, Tor- 
onto, Ont., Canada M5S 2S8; 416-635- 
2763; resist62 tao.ca. 

Ft. Benning-Nov. 22 

Cross the Line at 
the SOA 

What are you doing Nov. 22? The 
School of Americas Watch is looking for 
1,000 good men and women to help per- 
manently close the U.S. school for torture 
at Ft. Benning, Georgia. It is dubbed the 
School of Assassins by activists for train- 



Francisco Rebordosa 1918-1998 


W ith the hope of leaving a fruitful seed, 
the bodies of the Spanish libertarians 
are sowing the earth in various continents of 
the planet. In Montreal, it is our dear Cisco 
Rebordosa. He was preceded by Enrique 
Castillos, who dedicated many years of his 
life to militancy, Alfred Munr6s (see Fall 
1996 FE), whose illustrations are well known 
to readers of our publications, and Alfred 
Ruiz, a veteran of the anti-Franco struggle 
in Spain, where he was imprisoned. 

When they arrived in Canada in De- 
cember 1951, the church was very power- 
ful. Three families faced the precarious- 
ness of their new situation when soon after 
they found a house to rent together, the 
parish priest appeared at their door to ask 
why he had not seen them in church. Upon 
hearing their reply, that they weren’t in 
the habit of attending mass, the priest 
replied: “ If you don’t go to church, you 
won’t be very lucky in Canada.” Today, 
things in that country have changed sig- 
nificantly, and our compaiieros are due 
some credit for that change. 

Rebordosa always gave himself fully 
to the cause with unique dedication. It was 
he who founded the S.I.A. (Sociedad In- 
ternational Anti-fascista), and it was our 
Cisco who, with other compaiieros orga- 
nized the Montreal C.N.T. (Confederacidn 
Nacional de Trabajadores). He later helped 
form the Liga Democrdtica Espaiiola in 
1960 which published the magazine Um- 
bral, profusely illustrated with the draw- 
ings of Munrds, and organized the well- 
known anti-Franco protests and demon- 
strations, denouncing oppression and the 
death penalty sentences imposed first on 


ing 60,000 Latin American soldiers who 
return home to murder, torture, rape and 
intimidate the poor and those working for 
the rights of the poor. 

Last November 16, 2000 people dem- 
onstrated at Ft. Benning demanding the 
facility be closed. 601 people were ar- 
rested who “crossed the line” drawn by 
the cops and MPs at the base entrance. 
First-time offenders were given a letter 
barring them from the premises for a year. 
Repeat offenders, thirty in all, were given 
jail sentences for trespassing. 

The alma mater of such U.S. -trained 
grotesque torturers as Salvador’s Robert 
“Blowtorch Bob” d’ Aubisson must be shut 


Granados and Delgado, and then Puig 
Antich in Barcelona, and Heinz Chez in 
Tarragona. All were killed by the state (by 
firing squad or garrote) after they came to 
know and be influenced by libertarian 
ideas. 

Rebordosa never stopped contributing 
through every means available without 
holding back or shunning sacrifice, nor 
did he ever lack the support of his 
companera Carmen who shared in this 
self-sacrifice and activism. In recent years, 
Cisco was the only remaining survivor of 
a large number of compaiieros in Mont- 
real. Faithful at all times, he continued 
contributing and serving as an example 
for others. 

Despite the fact that our compaiieros 
lived in Canada, they always carried vivid 
memories of their exile years in France, 
and Cisco, like almost all the others, suf- 
fered the hardships of the concentration 
camps and forced labor. He was also im- 
prisoned for a short time and threatened 
with deportation to Germany. He actively 
followed the reorganization of the C.N.T. 
and took part in various C.N.T. sponsored 
activities: tours, festivals, assemblies, ple- 
nums, always thinking about Spain and 
taking on heavy responsibilities. Above 
all, there prevailed in him that sense of 
solidarity and generosity which bonded us 
to one another. In 1990, Cisco had surgery 
to remove a kidney and the following year 
he returned with Carmen to France and 
Spain, anxious to see the dear compaiieros 
from the old days, and felt again the power 
of their friendship as a new stimulus for 
life. Unfortunately, though he tried, he 
was unable to repeat this journey. 

The self-sacrifice, generosity and al- 
truism of our friend has always been shared 
by his companera. Carmen. Their home 
was always open, offering the bread and 
salt of friendship to those who arrived 
from various countries, a home where true 
human solidarity exists, generated by the 
love of ideas. We possess a great spiritual 
wealth when we feel ourselves united in a 
large family of compaiieros like Carmen 
and Francisco. 

Today, when the loss of that good 
companero fills us with sorrow and clouds 
our eyes, we can only hope to honor his 
memory by continuing down the path he 
always walked: the path of the Ideal, and 
to devote ourselves to that which united us 
in our youth. 

To Carmen, his children Linda and 
Jazmfn, we say: “Our dear Cisco, like our 
ideas, is imperishable. He will live in us 
and in those who succeed us, because that 
is the only path that leads to human well- 
being.” 

Salud Cisco, salud, companero and 
brother, salud, salud. 

— Federico Arcos 


down. Contact SOA Watch, 1719 Irving 
St. NW, Washington DC 20010 and pledge 
to “cross the line” this November. 


If You Received A 
Sample Copy 

If you are prisoner or Gl you must 
write back to let us know you 
want a free subscription. 
Civilians, please fill out the 
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editions. 




PAGE 8 


FIFTH ESTATE SUMMER 1998 




rampj 


ref uded to obey; 


time , poddeddiorw, 


an? V lep tin 

, ■ ■ . 

. . 

counter-rhythm 


Atiaid Nin, 


Anarchy, 

EOIMPRESSIONISM, 


THE WANDERING OF HUMANITY 

By Allan Antliff 


Anais Nin’s encounter with the home- 
less wanderers of her day — the tramps of 

Paris, “in counter-rhythm to the world” — 
reminds me of an enduring duality in anar- 
chism. We stand at one remove from capital- 
ism, attempting in our own way to live in a 
degraded world in spite of it. In the quest to 
realize our ideals many of us have joined the 
ranks of such rebels, who subsist on capital’s 
margins. 

Recently someone at Detroit’s 
Trumbullplex spoke to me of wandering, 
riding the rails across the continent. Others 
travelled too — punks and tramps who gave 
barely a passing nod were comrades in a 
shared adventure that moved from roadside 
campouts to the squats and info shops of the 
cities. He found his community there, traced 
out among those on the margins of everyday 
life, beyond capitalism’s jailed society of obe- 
dience, constraint, and self-negation. When 
I met him he and a companion were prepar- 
ing to travel again; this time to Chiapas, 

Mexico. Unknown to most anarchists wan- 
dering too has an important history within 
our movement. In this essay I’ve set out to 
recover that history and, hopefully, to give 
these anarchist travellers a sense of the con- 
tinuity of rebellion animating their lives. 

Let us return to Europe and an earlier time, toward the end 
of the 19th century. Following the fall of the Paris Commune in 
1871 successive Republican governments presided over an ex- 
plosive expansion of French industrial capitalism which eroded 
older forms of production and community life. The capitalist 
juggernaut was made possible thanks to a new infrastructure of 
railroads and roads which penetrated the countryside, bringing 
economic transformation to hitherto relatively untouched areas/ 1 ’ 
In villages, towns, and hamlets, craftsmen were displaced by 
cheap goods mass-produced in factories. Small-scale farms geared 
to the material needs and ecological capacities of the local com- 
munity were undermined by imported produce from abroad and 
the reconfiguration of agricultural production on a large-scale, 
export-oriented basis. This process was augmented by a great 


The Wanderer j, 1897 

depression that lasted from 1873 to 1896. Then an economy in 
crisis forced artisans and peasants into debt, and from there to 
the mines, factories, mills, and urban centers that fed the indus- 
trial capitalist monolith. <J) 

Roger Magraw writes that as the old skills and rural commu- 
nities died, uprooted, alienated, deskilled workers sunk into drink, 
crime, and domestic violence/ 3 ’ But many of the displaced re- 
fused to be victims. They entered into a state of revolt against 
encroaching capitalist servitude: and their revolt found articula- 
tion in an anarchist critique of marginalization and the cruel ex- 
istence of the dispossessed. 

Nowhere was this critique more clearly encapsulated than 
in the art of the Belgium and French Neo-impressionists, a group 
of artist-revolutionaries whose paintings and graphic contribu- 
tions to journals such as Le Pere Pinard, L’Endehors, La Plume, 



The Coal Gleaners of Liege, 1891 


L’Assiette Au Beurre, and Les Temps Nouveaux played a key 
agitational role in the anarchist movement/'* 1 

Take, for example, The Wanderers (1897), a lithograph pro- 
duced by the Neo-impressionist Theo Van Rysselberghe for an 
album of prints issued by Les Temps Nouveaux. Van Rysselberghe 
took his title, “The Wanderers,” from a poem of the same name 
by the anarchist playwright Emile Verhaeren. Beneath the print 
was a passage from Verhaeren’s poem which reads: 

“Thus the poor people cart misery for great distances over 
the plains of the earth . . 

Who are Van Rysselberghe’s dispossessed? In the late 1880s 
and early 1890s the workers of Belgium repeatedly rose up in a 
series of mass strikes, riots, and violent clashes v/ith the police 
and army. The first such incident erupted in the industrial city of 
Li6ge, where an anarchist commemoration of the Paris Com- 
mune led to full-scale rioting that spread throughout the country’s 
industrial mining region/ 51 We can better grasp the desperation 
of the Liege region’s anarchists through photos and drawings of 
their living hell-the “prosperous” towns where workers were 
reduced to combing slag heaps for bits of coal after hours. Men, 
women, and children worked ten to thirteen hour days, six days 
a week, in the mines and mills of Belgium. They were paid at or 
below subsistence level; and if there was no work, they starved/™ 

Van Rysselberghe’s Wanderers are working-class refugees 
displaced by poverty, the police, and the army. In the 1890s 
thousands of such families were forced onto the roads of Bel- 
gium by grinding unemployment, lockouts, or vicious acts of 
government suppression. “They cart their misery for great dis- 
tances,” Verhaeren wrote. Enraged at the injustice, Van 
Rysselberghe depicted these rebels in their most abject moment 
of defeat, condemned to wandering without end in a world ruled 
by an economic system that “capitalizes everything, assimilates 
everything, and makes it its own.” (7) 

Where might they have wandered? Perhaps to the city, to 
join the despairing multitudes of unemployed and underem- 
ployed. Henri Lebasque’s lithograph, Provocation (1900), bears 
testimony to the kind of marginal life awaiting them there, in the 
great marketplaces of capital. This print was also distributed by 
Les Temps Nouveaux. 

Provocation is a stark critique of starvation in the face of 
capitalism’s “plenitude,” the provocation being the 
commodification of bread, humanity’s most basic sustenance. A 
child stands weak and listless, staring at loaves of bread dis- 
played in a brightly-lit shop window. Business prospers while 
the child starves. Similar testimony to the inhumane idiocy of 
capitalism is captured in a drawing by Georges Bradberry for Les 
Temps Nouveaux? s July, 1907 issue. “The starving man,” Bradberry 
writes, “envies the satiated beasts!” And so a rural outcast stands mute 


by a field of fattened cows; valueless, penniless, and “worthless.” 

While some anarchists focused on the dispossessed’s plight, 
others gave tangible form to the oppression of work in the cru- 
cible of capitalist modernity. In 1889 the Neo-impressionist Camille 
Pissarro created a small booklet, entitled Social Turpitudes, which 
depicted the drudgery of emergent forms of urban wage labor. 
Among jfiem is a depiction of seamstresses slaving under the 
watchful, eye of a supervisor. They nuncnwerpiecewomm a 
debtors’ prison, where they have been condemned by their pov- 
erty to endless, repetitious tasks. Pissarro also showed the bru- 
talization of day-laborers. An illustration for the May, 1893 issue 
of La Plume, for example, depicts the backbreaking drudgery of 
stevedores who spent their lives — when they could obtain work 
— shoveling and hauling coal. 



Provocation, 1900 


U 


Anarchy to aLw 
pointed to 
different 
pojoibilitiej, 
poojibilitieo they 
found latent in 
Europe o 
beoieged 
pre-capitaiut 
wage of life. 
Here critique woo 
wed to utopia, 
and the condition 
of wandering 
took on new 




meaning , 



t iaw 


painterly technique 


the harmony in 


freedom that could 


unite humanity 


recon cile uo with 


nature . 


Factory Smokestacks, Couillet, 1898-99 


ao an analogue for 


Social Turpitudes, 1889 


Thus far I have discussed the anarchists’ damning criticism 
of industrial capitalist labor and the injustice of working-class 
destitution. However this was not the sum total of their critique. 
Anarchists also pointed to different possibilities, possibilities they 
found latent in Europe’s besieged pre-capitalist ways of life. Here 
critique was wed to utopia, and the condition of wandering took 
on new meaning. 

The latter theme emerges in a second depiction of wan- 
dering by the Neo-impressionist Maximilien Luce, entitled Fac- 
tory Smokestacks, Couillet (1898-99). Luce was an uncompromis- 
ing working-class militant who was briefly imprisoned for his 
anarchist activities in 1894. Towards the end of the 1890s he 
travelled through northern France and Belgium recording his 
impressions of the oppressive mining towns and factories/ H> An 
exhibition of his paintings held in 1891 led one anarchist art 
critic to write of “the bleeding soul of the people, the life of the 
multitudes anguished and inflamed by suffering and bitterness. 


Factory Smokestacks is dominated by the grim industrial capi- 
talist inferno of Couillet, where treeless streets of rooming houses 
disgorged workers daily into the hellish maw of the mills. But in 
the comer of the painting a man and boy walk away from the 
entrapment of this inferno. Their destination is unnamed; their 
purpose, undetermined. They might be setting out on a journey, 
or perhaps they seek momentary respite from the grey, polluted 
environment they leave behind. In any event, they are passing 
from one world to another-the rhythm of capital gives way to 
the rhythm of nature. 

Luce and the Neo-impressionists were fully aware of the 
violence emergent capitalism unleashed on nature’s rhythms and 
the crippling contortions its industries imposed on humanity. 
They read the writings of Elisee Reclus and Peter Kropotkin, 
who both condemned the disequilibrium of industrial capitalism 
as a violation of harmonious social relations and, ultimately, of 
humanity’s relationship to the earth. Writing in 1864 Reclus ob- 
served that the capitalist “pillages the earth; he exploits it vio- 
lently and fails to restore its riches, in the end rendering it unin- 
habitable. The truly civilized man understands that his interest is 
bound up with the interest erf everyone and with that of nature.” 

Tum-of-the-century anarchists revolted in the name of a har- 
monious utopia in which property would be held in common 
and social and ecological conflict would be banished. Hannony 
entailed a freedom that respected and nurtured differences while 
sustaining the good of the whole. Just as mutual aid undergirded 
the diverse interrelatedness of plants, insects, and animals, so 
humanity could realize a greater diversity through cooperation/"’ 
However, this farsighted and demanding vision ran against the 
grain of history. Far easier and more “sensible” to follow Marx- 
ism, which gloried in the myth that the industrial capitalist sys- 
tem could produce unending wealth, and had only to be har- 
nessed for the social good of all/ 12 ’ 

Where could the anarchist utopia Find a sure footing in the 
world? In the first instance, among other anarchists. Reclus wrote 
of our obligation “to free ourselves personally from all precon- 
ceived or imposed ideas, and gradually group around ourselves 
comrades who live and act in the same fashion.” Such “small 
and intelligent societies,” he argued, could form the basis of a 
greater harmonious social order/' }) 

However the growing community of anarchists was not the 
sole social force working against the industrial capitalist levia- 
than. Reclus and others looked to the surviving patterns of com- 
munal existence among the peasantry, where the traces of a 
different social rhythm still prevailed. Pissarro’s great Neo-im- 
pressionist paintings, such as Harvesting Apples of 1889, capture 
the cadence of this life, where work was as yet untouched by 
the regulatory regime of capitalized production. These workers 
take their time. They pause to chat amongst themselves and 
their activity is voluntary and cooperative. Here humanity trans- 
forms the world through cultivation, rather than destruction. 

Thus, everyday life approaches a condition of harmony akin 
to anarchism — or so the anarchist writer and critic Octave Mirbeau 
thought. Mirbeau wrote that Pissarro’s canvases depict a world 
animated by “the ideal,” where the cities of capital, “booming as 
they may be, are no more perceptible, having no more planetary 
importance, behind the fold of terrain that hides them, than the 
lark’s nest in the bottom of a furrow.” 0 ’ 1 ’ Without a doubt these 
paintings are utopian. We know that Pissarro and other anarchist 
artists also depicted the brutalization of landless peasant laborers 
on the large capitalized farms of rural France. However die Neo- 
impressionists were equally enthralled by the life-cycle they en- 
countered in Europe’s small liamlets and landholdings, where self- 
sufficiency and pre-capitalist ways still persisted. 

In fact. Neo-impressionism’s technique was suffused with 
anarchist utopianism. The Neo-impressionists applied unique and 
discrete colors on the canvas— the small dots of paint that give 
these paintings their soft glow and shimmering radiance-accord- 
ing to scientific principles of vision, so as to produce an overall 
harmonious effect. They saw their painterly technique as an ana- 
logue for the harmony in freedom diat could unite humanity 
and, in turn, reconcile us with nature. Robyn Sue Roslak writes 
that the visual synthesis of the neo-impressionist canvas reflected 

...The progressive process through which Harmony and 
Variety in Unity (terms which defined die ideal anarchist 
social structure) were achieved. These, of course, were the 
very terms which die Neo-impressionists and their critics 
used to describe Neo-impressionist painting. There, indi- 
vidual spots of paint, akin to the human individuals in 
anarcho-communist social theory, are amassed to form 




— 



unified, harmonious, synthetic compositions, which appear 
as such because of the way in which the discrete colors are 
scientifically applied to compliment one another while 
preserving their own, unique character. 

Thus the Neo-impressionists fused utopia with reality, giving 
their ideals a material presence in the form of social critiques on 
canvas that pointed toward an anarchic future. 

Of course this future could not be achieved without revolu- 
tion. And the anarchists knew that among the masses of dis- 
placed and dispossessed workers condemned to wandering by 
a pitiless capitalist order, the memory of revolts and the hope of 
revolution remained. In fact, many anarchist militants came from 
the ranks of these working class itinerants, who played a key 
role in the movement as they travelled from place to place spread- 
ing revolutionary ideas through pamphlets, songs, and conver- 
sations. In his tum-of-the-century account of French anarchism, 
called The Anarchist Peril, F61ix Dubois wrote of one such 
trimardeur (vagabond, tramp), nicknamed “The Sot,” who lived 
“on the highway.” He was one of many who had “turned his 
back on a corrupt society” to become “a wandering and ami- 
able bohemian” in the service of the anarchist idea. (K>) 

In 1896 the Neo-impressionist Henri-Edmond Cross paid 
homage to one such anarchist in an illustration issued by Les 
Temps Nouveaux. Copies of this print may well have circulated 
the length and breath of France and beyond. Cross entitled his 
print. The Wanderer. 

The Wanderer sits alone, caught up by a visionary revelry. 
Behind him is the vision itself. The revolution has won and 
workers are throwing the insignia of capitalist oppression-flags 
and other symbols of authority-into a raging bonfire. These 
workers, and the wanderer himself, are surrounded by a beau- 
tiful Neo-impressionist landscape. Harmony in freedom has trans- 
formed the anarchist “utopia” into reality. 

Which brings me again to our present-day wandering. Anar- 
chists such as Cross’ Wanderer 'were outcasts, but they also were 
free. Their freedom resided in a day-to-day life apart from capital 
and the revolutionary vision they propagated to the wretched 
workers encountered along the way. like Nin’s tramps they too 
abandoned time, possessions, labor, and slavery in a refusal to 
obey. And like them they existed in counter-rhythm to a world in 
which their ideals were deemed valueless. But anarchism’s wan- 
derers were not capital’s victims. They struggled for a better world- 
-just like their counterparts do today, as they pass from Detroit to 
Chiapas, and a thousand places in between. 


Notes 

1 . Roger Magraw A History of the French Working Class: 
Workers and the Bourgeois Republic, 1871-1939 (Oxford: 
Blackwell Publishers, 1992), 5-7. Similarly, the capitalists 
of North America have dreamed up a network of "super- 
highways" intended to link up the non-unionized and 
impoverished production centers of Mexico to Northern 
consumption points. See "NAFTA Superhighways 
Threaten North America," Earth First! (September-Octo- 
ber, 1997): 17-20. 

2. Ibid, 5. 

3. Ibid, 11. 

4. All these journals were anarchist publications. 

5. Stephen H. Goddard Les XX and the Belgium Avant- 
Garde (Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1 992), 24. 

6. Ibid, 56; 69-70, notes 6, 7. Thus tum-of-the-century 
"free trade" functioned as an tool of impoverishment, 
much as it does under the current NAFTA agreement in 
which North America's workers "compete" with imports 
from the industrial gulags of Mexico and Mexican peas- 
ant farmers "compete" with US and Canadian corporate 
agro-businesses. 

7. Jacques Camatte, "The Wandering of Humanity," The World 
We Must Leave (New York: Autonomedia, 1 995), 39. 

8. Richard D. Sonn Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin 
de Siecle France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 
1989), 145. 

9. Georges Darien, "Maximilien Luce," La Plume LVII 
(1891): 300. 

10. Elisee Reel us, "Du Sentiment de la nature dans les 
societes modemes," La Revue des deux mondes, 1 (Decem- 
ber, 1 864): 763. Cited in Marie Fleming The Geography of 
Freedom (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1 988), 1 1 4. 

1 1 . See Peter Kropotkin Mutual Aid (Montreal: Black Rose 
Books, 1988). 


Harvesting Apples, 1889 


12. For the definitive critique of Marxism's "mirroring" of industrial 
capitalism's workings see Jean Baudrillard The Mirror of Production (St 
Louis: Telos Press, 1975). 

1 3. Reclus to Clara Koettlitz, 12 April 1895. Cited in Fleming, The Ge- 
ography of Freedom, 1 75. 

14. Octave Mirbeau, "Camille Pissarro," L'Art dans les deux mondes 8 
(10 January, 1891): 84. Cited in Martha Ward Pissarro Neo-impression- 
ism and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press, 1996), 181. 

15. Robyn Sue Roslak Scientific Aesthetics and the Aesthetkized Earth: 
the Parallel Vision of the Neo-Impressionist landscape and Anarcho-Com- 
munist Social Theory (Ph.D. diss.. University of California at Los Angeles, 
1 987), 204. Roslak's is by far and away the best study of Neo-impres- 
sionism to date. 

1 6. Felix Dubois The Anarchist Peril (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1 894), 82. 


Remembering Castoriadis & Bahro 

Bahro and Castoriadis were important voices in the breakup of traditional 
leftism and the emergence of new forms of radicalism. 


1 2 December 1997 two writers died 
wbo influenced our perspective — 
Rudolf Bahro and Cornelius 
Castoriadis, both former marxists ca- 
pable of valuable insights as well as 
sssry questionable positions. Bahro and 
Cisacnacis were original thinkers, neverthe- 
less- aod deserve recognition as important 
K*ces in the breakup of traditional leftism 
arc emergence of new forms of radical- 


C “clius Castoriadis (1922-1997) 

In the early to mid- 1970s, the essays of 
Castoriadis (written under several pseud- 
s including the most famous among 
radical and ultra-left readers, Paul Cardan) 
piayed a significant role in our political 
transformation from new/old leftism to 
ar.archo-communism and beyond. His 
eari> works, many of them published in 
English by the London Solidarity group, 
found their way to the Fifth Estate office 
and. along with the work of Jacques Ca- 
matte, situationist theory, and other ultra- 
left and anarchist materials (often brought 
to our attention by Fredy Perlman), be- 
came the source of many lively discus- 
sions and debates that pushed us all the 
way to the left and eventually off the 
spectrum altogether. Such essays as “The 
Fate of Marxism,” “History & Revolu- 
tion,” and “Redefining Revolution” con- 
tributed to our clarifying the outlines of 
what Castoriadis called “the ruin of clas- 
sical marxism” and the “reconstruction of 
revolutionary theory . . . [as] a permanent 
challenge." 

We continued to read his work from 
time to time in the pages of Telos during 
the late 1970s and early 1980s, but were 
eventually dismayed to read him argue in 
his essay, “Facing the War,” in the Winter 
1980-81 issue, during the height of 
grassroots Western European and U.S. 
resistance to growing nuclear war prepa- 
rations. that Russia had become “the pri- 
mary world military power with all that 
presupposes industrially and technologi- 
cally ” This meant that “Europe’s only 

protection still rests in the ICBM silos and 
Polaris submarines of the U.S.” (His con- 
voluted defense of the deployment of 
Pershing and cruise missiles, based on the 
ludicrous assumption of Russian military 
superiority, was nevertheless mixed into a 
very interesting and persuasive discus- 
sion of Soviet society.) 

To our relief, Castoriadis did not be- 
come merely another ex-leftist neo-con- 
servative defender of the Empire. Though 
we never read him systematically, we con- 
tinued to run across his provocative work. 
Whatever differences we had with his 
outlook, we found stimulating and some- 
times extremely valuable his dazzling mix 
of modem insight and classical erudition. 
Castoriadis’ critique of marxist pseudo- 
scientific rationalism and its ideology of 
progress, his expanded notion of the idea 
of classes and hierarchic societies, his 
image of a “pyramid” mass society gener- 
ated by bureaucratic state capitalism both 
East and West, and his discussions of 
autonomous and heteronomous societies 
have found their way indirectly and di- 


rectly into what one might loosely call a 
Fifth Estate {joint of view. 

In the best obituary we’ ve seen so far of 
Castoriadis, in the English anarchist maga- 
zine Freedom, “NW” writes that he even- 
tually turned “increasingly to linguistics 
and mathematics, ancient history and pure 
philosophy.” In fact, Castoriadis’ discus- 
sions of ancient societies, though some- 
times obscure, were striking and invigo- 
rating. As the Freedom obit puts it, 
Castoriadis “developed an idiosyncratic 
humanistic position which emphasized the 
part played by individual imagination and 
creative culture in human affairs and which 
included a remarkable ‘ethic of mortal- 
ity,’ arguing that the absence of any kind 
of divinity above humanity and of any 
kind of existence after death made it all 
the more important to accept a tragic sense 
of both private and public life and to con- 
centrate on the development of autono- 
mous individuals in an autonomous soci- 
ety here and now.” 

More recent articles (for example, “The 
Greek and the Modern Political Imagi- 
nary,” in the Fall 1993 issue of Salma- 
gundi) inspired discussion just as the ar- 
ticles written twenty years before had — 
discussions which may not have led to a 
radical new turn, but which have planted 
seeds for future study, reflection and con- 
versation. As the Freedom writer com- 
ments, Castoriadis “helped to destroy some 
of the most harmful myths of our time”; 
the work he did to propose a new world to 
replace them now deserves more atten- 
tion. 

Rudolf Bahro (1935-1997) 

Rudolf Bahro’s book The Alternative 
in Eastern Europe (London, 1 979), a young 
administrator’s proposal for the reform of 
the stalinist bureaucracy, landed him in 
jail in East Germany when it was pub- 
lished in the West. Bahro’s Alternative , 
which simultaneously demystified Bol- 
shevism and defended its allegedly pro- 
gressive, revolutionary role and the ne- 
cessity of a one-party state, relied on a 
maoist-influenced idea of cultural revolu- 
tion and argued for a kind of pedagogic 
dictatorship to work in the objective inter- 
ests of the people. Thus, as Andrew Arato 
surmised (in a review in the Summer 1981 
Telos of a 1 980 col lection of essays edited 
by Ulf Wolter, Rudolf Bahro: Critical 
Responses), “it is impossible to neatly 
separate out the emancipatory . . . and 
authoritarian . . . features of Bahro’s work.” 

In fact, the “antinomies” detected by 
Arato reflected a tension in Bahro’s think- 
ing between egalitarian and authoritarian 
impulses that would remain unresolved. 
This tension was rendered more complex 
by Bahro’s Christian sensibility (as a so- 
cialist dissident he had already railed 
against the bureaucracy as a corrupted 
church and called for a kind of reforma- 
tion), a sensibility which apparently deep- 
ened by his Bible study during his time in 
prison. Bahro’s religious metaphors ex- 
tended, at times with compelling, seminal 
significance, other times with highly prob- 
lematic results, into his dissident green 
critique of industrialism. 


Expelled from East Germany to the 
West in 1980, Bahro fulfilled no one’s 
expectations — neither Cold Warriors nor 
Western marxists — of the exile-dissident, 
choosing instead to explore new terrain 
and to add dramatically original and pro- 
vocative insights to the emerging green 
movement. E.P. Thompson remarked in 
his preface to the English edition of 
Bahro’s Socialism and Survival (1982) 
that upon arriving in the West Bahro “hit 
the ground running, but running in his 
own direction.” Lacking any bitterness 
toward the East, and noticing in any case 
the same malaise in the West, Bahro re- 
jected both sides, and began to critique the 
whole structure and content of industrial 
civilization with a “prophetic sense of 
urgency” and an openness toward the uto- 
pian mode. Thompson also noted the ech- 
oes of William Morris in The Alternative. 
(Morris was a forerunner of green-social- 
ist utopianism and what one might in ret- 
rospect describe as nascent social eco- 
logical, critical-luddite thought. 

Bahro wrote (in Socialism and Sur- 
vival) that he was forced to reexamine his 
views, particularly in light of the ecologi- 
cal crisis, “in which all the contradictions 
of therprevailing mode of production and 
way of life, all the dangers of the world 
situation, intersect and coalesce. . . .” 
Bahro began to challenge the ideology of 
progress itself. “The very idea of progress 
mtrst be interpreted in a completely new 
way,” he wrote. “The per capita consump- 
tion of raw materials and energy, the per 
capita production of steel and cement that 
are adduced in all the statistics as criteria 
of progress, are typical criteria of a 
progress that is totally alienated.” The 
only “progress” worth talking about was a 
“progress in human emancipation,” and 
that required the abolition of industrial 
capitalism, in both small and large steps. 
“We must gradually paralyse everything 
that goes in the old direction,” he wrote in 
1981: “military installations arid 
motorways, nuclear power stations and 
airports, chemical factories and big hospi- 
tals, supermarkets and education works.” 

Bahro argued the need for a radical 
conversion reminiscent of the global re- 
orientation of values and lifeways Lewis 
Mumford had called for in the 1970s. “Let 
us consider how we can feed ourselves, 
keep warm, clothe ourselves, educate our- 
selves and keep ourselves healthy inde- 
pendent of the Great Machine,” Bahro 
declared. “Let us begin to work at this 
before the Great Machine has completely 
regulated us, concreted us over, poisoned 
us, asphyxiated us and sooner or later 
subjected us to total nuclear annihilation.” 

Eventually Bahro broke with the Green 
Party, arguing (in work done between 
1982-1985 translated and gathered into an 
English edition, Building the Green Move- 
ment) that the German ecology-peace 
party, by involving itself in the political 
administration of the nation-state, could 
“help bring about the final imperial resto- 
ration of the country.” He publicly re- 
signed in 1985, declaring that “the party is 
a counter-productive tool,” and that “the 
given political space is a trap into which 


life energy disappears, indeed, where it is 
rededicated to the spiral of death.” 

Bahro started out as a loyal opposition- 
ist of the East German Communist Party, 
calling for its reform, believing in the ^ 
necessity of the leading, conscious minor- 
ity, but ended by turning his back on all 
parties and party politics, though not on 
the process of radical inquiry, association 
and action. But he did not resolve the 
problem of authority, and toward the end 
of his life was proposing increasingly ab- „ 
surd and disturbing ideas — for example, 
ecological theocracy and the need to “re- 
deem Hitler” and “liberate [the] brown 
parts” in the German character. (See 
Staudenmaier and Biehl, Ecofascism: Les- 
sons from the German Experience, as well 
as my Fall 1997 FE review, “Swamp Fe- 
ver, Primitivism & the ‘Ideological Vor- 
tex’” for discussion of Bahro’s fascistic 
utterances.) This madness apparently had 
its roots in the original, unresolved 
authoritarianism of his early work, com- 
bined perhaps with his failure to make 
balanced use of insights from archaic reli- 
gious traditions (evidenced by at least one 
bizarre episode along the way — his fasci- 
nation with the Bhagwan Rajneesh cult in 
the mid-1980s). 

Bahro’s decline was unfortunate be- 
cause his contribution, however erratic, 
was remarkable. He suffered cancer the 
last few years of his life (making him 
possibly one of millions of victims of 
industrial contamination), and one won- 
ders if his illness did not exacerbate his 
theoretical breakdown. But such specula- 
tion is not reasonable analysis, and what- 
ever the circumstances one must take re- 
sponsibility for what one writes; Bahro’s 
last writings were shameful and disap- 
pointing. 

Bahro’s important insights into the 
exterminist system are worth remember- 
ing nevertheless; they were compelling in 
part because they came from an ex-marxist 
who had learned many of the valuable 
lessons offered by marxist anti-capital- 
ism, but who superseded that perspective 
toward a deeper notion of radical transfor- 
mation, even if ultimately his project was 
marred by failure and folly. At his best, he 
was a strikingly original voice of con- 
science in opposition to the global “Great 
Machine.” 

“We must live differently in order to 
survive!” he warned the peace movement 
in the early 1980s. That task still lies 
before us, more imperative than ever. 

— David Watson 

FE Note: The Castoriadis obituary ap- 
peared in the Feb. 7, 1998 Freedom (An- 
gel Alley, 84b Whitechapel High Street, 
London El 7QX UK). The Freedom 
Bookshop (same address) carries his pam- 
phlets. 

“Who Can Stop the Apocalypse?” — an 
excerpt from Bahro’s Socialism and Sur- 
vival — appeared in a 12-page, FE 1990 
Earth Day Special, available through our 
book service free with book orders, or for 
postage (send $ 1 .24 for a pound ’ s worth), 
or $1 postage and handling for a single 
copy. 


SUMMER 1998 FIFTH ESTATE 


PAGE 13 


Riots in Poland 




Demonstrations against the Pope 
in Poland and the Czech Republic 


A few days before Christmas, five Poles were 
kidnapped in Chechnya, where they were with a 
convoy of humanitarian aid (food, medicines, 
clothes). Two of the five are members of the 
Polish Anarchist Federation (FA). These are 
Marek Kurzyniec — a veteran FA activist, and 
Krzysztof Galinski — one of the founders of the 
anarchist magazine Mac Pariadka (“Mother of 
Order”)- The other hostages are Pawel Chojnaeki 
and Pavel Thiel, former members of the peace- 
organization WiP (Freedom and Peace — one of 
the predecessors to FA), and the journalist 
Dominik Piaskowski. 

The van of the hostages was found 40 
kilometers west of Grozny with its two front tires 
shot out. They were attacked by 1 5 people. Two 
Chechen bodyguards (friends of one of the hos- 
tages) were with them who shot two of the at- 
tackers. 

One of the theories (for informational pur- 
poses only — we take no position) is that the 
Russian secret services hired Chechen crimi- 
nals to do the kidnapping. They can then blame 
the Chechens — that they can’t be trusted, are 
unstable and dangerous — therefore giving a pre- 
text for a Russian crackdown. Poles and 
Chechens have good relations — they have a 
shared interest in forming a bloc against their 
colonizers. Russians might have hoped this crime 
would strain relations between the two countries. 

Marek Kurzyniec and Krzysztof Galinski 
became well known in Chechnya when they were 
organizing convoys of humanitarian aid to the 
country during the war with Russia. Three con- 
voys organized with the help of the Anarchist 
Federation were the only ones which reached the 
areas of fighting. All other convoys organized 
by the UN were stopped by the Russians and 
their cargo was sold on the black market. The 
Polish Anarchist Federation also organized dem- 
onstrations at Russian consulates in Poland, and 
gathered signatures for a petition to protest the 
imperialist policies of the Russian government. 

Update: News reached us that our Polish 
comrades have been freed! A big thanks to 
everyone who contacted Chechen 
representatives around the world and helped 
spread the news about the hostages. 


Without Church Dogma to the 21 Century! 

This was the motto of the event which took 
place during the Pope’s visit in Wroclaw in 
Poland and was organized by the Liberty Forum. 
On the first day there was a seminar on the threat 
to human freedom caused by the doctrine and 
activity of the Catholic Church. A lot of people 
showed up for this conference, not only punks 
but mostly normal people, and it got some 
coverage in the press. There was also a small 
happening made by Anarcho-Feminists. The con- 
ference was slightly disturbed by a couple of 
boneheads, but nothing happened. 

However, the demonstration planned for the 
following day was not possible for several 
reasons. First of all it turned out that nazis had 
organized a counter-demo at the same spot as 
the anarchists were planning theirs. There were 
about 200-250 of them, and not just kids, but 
really grown dickheads. They were shoutii?^ “All 
true Poles love the Holy Father.” Because there 
were only 30 anarchists, and they didn’t feel sui- 
cidal at the moment, the demo didn’t take pl^ce. 
Anyway, the image of fascist salutations to the 
pope riding by sent the right message even with- 
out anarchists present. 

Statement by the organizers: 

The Liberty Forum organizes and is open to 
cooperation with all groups, social circles and 
individuals, which act for freedom, tolerance and 
cultural variety. The Liberty Forum declares for 
open society and peaceful coexistence of all out- 
looks on life. We are against every kind of domi- 
nation of one cultural, political or religious op- 
tion. With anxiety we are observing authoritarian 
(nationalist and clerical) tendencies in Polish 
society. 

The action “Without Church Dogma to the 
21 Century!” is our protest against clerical 
repression in social life and religious dictator- 
ship which is going to be imposed by the Church 
and political circles connected with it. 

We are expecting support and help from 
everybody who prefers critical intellect and 
human freedom to the Church dogma. 

Let our united resistance against authoritari- 
anism destroy state borders and national divi- 
sions! 


Actions against the Pope in Prague 

The Czech Republic also had local anarchist 
actions against the Pope. A group of 30-40 
members of the Czechoslovak Anarchist 
Federation demonstrated on one of the main 
squares in Prague against the Pope's visit They 
distributed several hundreds of leaflets, based 
upon a famous Andre Breton surrealist mani- 
festo describing burning churches during the an- 
archist uprisings in Spain. A planned rally 
through the City had been banned by the local 
authorities and some 100 heavily armed riot- 
police pigs were present. A group of anarchists 
with a red-and-black flag gave interviews to nu- 
merous journalists, and after some 30 minutes 
the meeting was ended to avoid a skirmish with 
the riot police. 

The project FREE WROCLAW 

After the decline of Communism in Poland, 
people got confused. Some of them, especially 
the young, believed in capitalism, free markets 
and western culture, some started believing that 
the improvement of the situation is possible only 
by realizing conservative and nationalistic values. 
But most people in Poland are still passive and 
do not believe in the possibility of improving 
their lives. They live day in and day out and do 
not want to think about their future. Only a very 
few young people want to do something — most 
of them are passive and indifferent like the rest 
of society. 

In order to create a place for active people, 
we want to set up a center so people can talk, 
organize themselves to solve their own problems 
and discuss questions. We would like to estab- 
lish an alternative book shop for exchanging 
ideas and information, a place where people can 
meet, drink coffee, tea or have a beer. The project 
FREE WROCLAW would give jobs to the young 
unemployed. It would be a non-profit organiza- 
tion. 

If we manage to establish our goals, FREE 
WROCLAW would be the first and the only type 
of organization of its kind in Poland. 

Unfortunately it is very difficult to realize 
our goal when money is extremely difficult to 
come by for us average people. Therefore we 
would like to ask for your help. Every kind of 
help (money-even a small sum, computer equip- 
ment and so on) is useful to us. 

If you are interested in our activity and want 
to help us or receive additional information about 
us please write to: 

Stowarzyszenie RUCH 
P.O. BOX 2319 

50-958 WROCLAW 47, POLAND 

OUR ACCOUNT: 

Powszechna Kasa Oszczednosci 
Bank Panstwowy, IV Oddzial we 

Wroclsawiu 

RUCH-Stowarzysznie na Rzecz 
Spoleczenstwa Antyautorytarnego 
93549-42462-132 




The 10th of January, riots broke out in 
Slupsk, a Polish city near the seaside. Thousands 
of young people fought the police with stones 
and molotovs, and made barricades on the streets. 
Over 30 cops were reportedly injured, while two 
dozen police cars were wrecked (four of them 
totally burned), and two police stations were 
attacked. About 100 persons were arrested (15- 
18 years old). 

The reason was the murder of a 13-year-old 
basketball fan by a policeman. The kid received 
a blow to his head with a massive club while he 
was running from the police forces attacking 
a group of fans. The cops then prevented passers- 
by from helping the kid, and he died. 

The riots started with a demonstration in front 
of the police station where people shouted 
“Death for killers!,” “Police: Gestapo!,” 
“We want justice!” The police used teargas to 
disperse the crowd, and beat people indiscrimi- 
nately, including innocent bystanders. 


^ About On Gogol 

Boulevard 

This section is produced for the Fifth 
Estate by Neither East Nor West; a New 
York City group linking alternative oppo- 
sitions in the East and West, and printing 
news and documents unavailable in the 
corporate and "left" media. Our title refers 
to Moscow’s Gogol Boulevard, a favorite 
hangout of Soviet-era counterculture 
youth dissidents, artists, and peace and 
human rights activists. 

We encourage all those involved in 
"Neither East Nor West”-type activity to 
regularly contribute to this section. Please 
address letters, reports, documents, 
debates, graphics, photos, etc. directly to 
OGB. 

This is not a section for anarchists only. 
We are interested in promoting freedom, 
workers rights, women’s, minority and gay 
rights, environmental, self-determination 
and anti-militarist issues — any struggle 
pursuing paths outside the capitalist and 
state bureaucratic models. 


Address correspondence to: 

OGB/NENW, 528 Fifth St 
Brooklyn, NY 11215, USA 
tel: 1-718-499-7720 


email: BobNenwOgb@aol.com 


web: //flag.blackened.net/agony 




PAGE 14 


SUMMER 1998 FIFTH ESTATE 





Anarchism in Estonia 


M.A.L (Estonian Anarchist Movement) is 
the movement of Estonian anarchists. It does 
not have a list of members and a membership 
fee. M.A.L. can not responsible for the acts of 
anarchists who would say they are members 
of M.A.L. The purpose of M.A.L. is to be an 
info-agency and facilitate contacts with for- 
eign anarchists or other revolutionary persons 
or organizations. 

WHAT DOES ANARCHY MEAN TO 
M.A.L.? The word “anarchy” comes of Greek 
“an arche” (without power). Accordingly man- 
kind is able to exist without laws and a state 
machine, without everything which would 
restrict the personal independence. Anarchy 
does not mean disorder or chaos. It is the con- 
science which would replace the laws of state. 

IS ANARCHY POSSIBLE? M.A.L. does 
not think it is possible. It will always be the 
ideal. The perfect world in the name of which 
we are fighting. The more important thing is 
the struggle which lifts up the life. To be an 
anarchist is the style of life. 

HOW TO STRUGGLE? Must we organ- 
ize many acts of terrorism to kill as much as 
possible non-anarchists? Or must we convince 
people? Or must we go to live into a forest to 
be away from the pernicious influence of 
society? It is the business of the anarchist 
because here is not one variety. 


CONTACT ADDRESSES: 

MAL (Estonian Anarchist Movement) Vilja 

8a-55, EE-2710 VORU, ESTONIA 

EDL (Estonian Democratic League) Sutiste 

34-6, EE-0034 Tallinn, ESTONIA 

RED EMMA (anarcho feminists) Box 449 

Tartu sjk, EE-2400, ESTONIA 

ANL (Anarcho Nudist League) Box 449 

Tartu sjk, EE-2400, ESTONIA 

AKF (Anarcho Communist Federation) 

Box 449 Tartu sjk, EE-2400, ESTONIA 



Do the Kurdish People need a State? 


It is our purpose to briefly shed some light 
on the situation in Kurdistan and to confront the 
crocodile tears which the capitalists and their 
media have been crying over Kurdistan. 

Kurdistan is a land in which the Kurdish peo- 
ple live in a feudal, capitalist system, where the 
workers, especially women and children suffer 
from poverty, abuse and oppression at the hands 
of those in power such as the Kurdish parties 
(the Kurdish Democratic Party, the Patriotic 
Union of Kurdistan) and from the PKK 
[Kurdistan Workers Party] who are doing for 
Kurdish freedom what Yasser Arafat (that na- 
tional liberation hero for the last 20 years) has 
done for the poor Palestinian population. 

After the Iranians were forced by the soldiers' 
uprising and by the poor population to leave 
southern Kurdistan and Iranian Kurdistan in 
March ‘9 1 , for a brief period these people, united 
against the government, felt their own power and 
demonstrated to the world what kind of tempest 
can be brought forth when the lower strata of 
society ignite in revolt. 

In order to crush and strangle the insurrec- 
tion as soon as possible, the Iranian government 
assassins, with the help of allied troops present 
in the area, formed a holy alliance against the 
revolt to instill law and order in southern Iraq, 
massacring unarmed people just like at the Paris 
Commune. 

Meanwhile in Kurdistan, the Kurdish par- 
ties. in the name of independent Kurdistan, sup- 
ported by local landowners, merchants and shop- 
keepers who all control the movement of the 
market, installed themselves as the new heads 
of Kurdistan, crushing all those who question 
their authority with an iron fist, just like any other 
authority in the world. 

Of course, as anarchists, none of this sur- 
prises us; we clearly see a class conflict, we see 
that all governments mean violence, the murder 
of and theft from the poor working population. 

The Left (among which are idiots and those 
who are simply confused in the head) have their 
heads filled up with Leninist ideology; they 
spend their time criticizing some sector of the 
government which doesn’t serve the working 


class well. 

Just like it’s true that you can’t expect a dog 
to talk or sing for it can only bark, we can only 
expect the state to act oppressively as it has done 
throughout history. 

Therefore we’re saying that it’s a big lie, an 
inexcusable lie, to say to the world through the 
mass media that the majority of the Kurdish 
population is suffering because of a lack of 
authority, because of the lack of a Kurdish state. 
The truth is that the poor population of Kurdistan 
is suffering just like the working class in the rest 
of the world; in many ways this is caused by the 
brutal force of the capitalist system and its 
authority. 

It is our task as anarchists to tell workers, 
teachers and students about the position of 
labor in Kurdistan, not to be so stupid as to just 
change leaders from Turks to Kurds, from Per- 
sians to Kurds, from Arabs to Kurds. We have to 
learn the lessons of our history and the history 
of the working class and that the solution is 
anarcho-communist revolution. This is an enor- 
mous, bloody event which needs to be prepared 
illegally, and must be international, otherwise it 
is a waste of energy. 

The flame of revolt is igniting in the hearts 
and consciousness of the Turkish, Persian and 
Arab workers, with students and soldiers who 
want an end to the power of the war machine, 
the power of poverty and the power of money. 

Our mission is to destroy authority, not to 
reincarnate it in the name of Kurdistan. Kurdistan 
and the rest of the world should cultivate life 
without the state. 

Long live the Kurdish language and music! 

Long live the spirit of revolutionary anarcho- 
communism in the Middle East and the rest 
of the world! 

Our objective is to abolish religion, the State, 
racism and money. 

— Kurdish Anarchists 

(from Germinal #7\/72. Translation by Laure A.) 


No more 
Chernobyls! 

Veselka is the name of an international anti- 
nuclear initiative to stop the construction of 
a nuclear power plant in Belarus. 

We are all opposed to the development of 
nuclear power and find it particularly disturbing 
and idiotic that authorities would consider build- 
ing a plant so close to the site of the Chernobyl 
disaster. The development of this project is 
being kept quite secret by the Lukashenko gov- 
ernment and attempts to oppose it have even re- 
sulted in attempted murder. We see this as yet 
more proof of the government’s total disinterest 
in the opinions or the interests of the people of 
Belarus and all the areas immediately surround- 
ing it. We want to build up opposition not only 
to the plant, but to the people who would build 
it. (And of course, those of us who are 
anarchists — and that’s not all of us, but some — 
also want this to be an example of the abuses of 
representative government.) 

The plant will be built in the Vitebsk 
region but the starting date for construction has 
yet to be decided. There has been talk that work- 
ers displaced from the Chernobyl zone (who have 
a high rate of unemployment) will be used for 
this labor. There were ideas about having a camp 
but first of all, this would be impossible given 
the size of the Belarus police state and second, 
many activists are critical of this as a tactic. We 
are going to be conducting various information 
campaigns and trying to build up local activ- 
ism. Later there will be various actions start- 
ing in April throughout Belarus and different 
points in Europe. 

Activists from 12 countries have already 
signed up for this project, so it already has inter- 
national scope. 

Anybody who is interested in this initiative 
should help out. We need international journal- 
ists who are willing to investigate the building 
of the plant and the condition of people reset- 
tled after Chernobyl in Belarus. Further, we need 
to cover expenses for posters, literature etc. Any- 
body that has good anti-nuclear material, es- 
pecially graphics, please send them to me via 
snail mail @ PO Box 500, Moscow 107051. 

— Laure A. 


Atshy is the name of the coolest com- 
mune in the Caucuses — a love shack in Maikop, 
home of anarchs and radicals trying to transform 
life. OK, maybe it’s not a love shack, but it’s 
communal living, harmony with nature, demo- 
cratic decision making... a model for other friends 
to follow. “Atshitsy” are actively involved in lots 
of projects, including running an activist/info 
center in Maikop. Unlike many people in com- 
munes, they haven’t “dropped out” of society 
but work hard to change it. 

Atshitsy have been particularly active in the 
ecological movement and have started publish- 
ing a digest. If you want to get in touch with 
them, you can reach them by e-mail at 
atshy@glasnet.ru. 


Eco-Anarchists 
penetrated Czech 
Nuclear Power Plant 

Th night of June 9 a group of four activists 
from eco-anarchist faction of CSAF (Czecho- 
slovak Anarchist Federation) penetrated the high 
security area of Temelin nuclear power plant in 
Southern Bohemia through an area with barbed 
wire obstacles, etc. They were’t spotted by 
special infra-red scanners and numerous secu- 
rity agents in guard towers. The anarchists then 
climbed the 1 50m high special cooling tower and 
showed a red anarchist flag with a black star. 

The security guards discovered them after 
five hours only because the fifth of the activists, 
who stayed outside, announced this successful 
direct action to the media. One of activists in the 
area of Temelin even reached the building where 
U 238/235 nuclear fuel is kept. No guard would 
have prevented the activists for instance setting 
bombs or damaging the building, etc. 

The police came several minutes after me- 
dia were alerted. All four activists were ar- 
rested and face charges of “destroying private 
property,” because they damaged the fences 
around the power plant by cutting the wire. 

The headquarters of CEZ, Czech energy 
company, claimed that they have nothing to say 
regarding this incident. The direct action again 
proved the disastrous state of security measures 
in Temelin. 

Czech Squat Evicted 

At 22.30 September 3rd, Police units stormed 
the new squat in Prague — Zenklova street. The 
house, which had stood empty for nine years, 
had been squatted for one month. The 15 squat- 
ters had begun repairs on all 30 rooms in the 
three story building, cleaning, replacing broken 
windows and installing a toilet. They also had 
plans to repair the plumbing which had been 
destroyed over the years and reconnect the elec- 
tricity. The squatters planned to open an info/ 
cafe and tea room. 

The whole event was widely covered by the 
media, with no comments. The short life of the 
squat was already successful — local citizens 
criticized the police for the eviction and praised 
the squatters for repairing the house, whose 
owner left it to deteriorate for long years. The 
families in the closest neighborhood, belonging 
to the Gypsy community, also showed some soli- 
darity with the squatters. 

Eight people arrested during the eviction may 
be charged after par. 249-a) of penal law — 
’’illegal use of housing estate” — for which they 
can be fined up to 50.000 CZK (1500 USD) or 
imprisoned for 2 years. In addition they can be 
liable for all expenses involved in the eviction. 

Two weeks after the eviction, some of the 
activists resquatted the building and reached 
some kind of agreement with the building’s 
owner. Around the same time, the squatters at 
28 Soccora street struck an agreement with the 
city authorities. In return for leaving the squat 
voluntarily, the squatters were given another 
house free of charge. The new building will 
house a “Center of Free Education,” run by the 
former squatters. 



SUMMER 1998 FIFTH ESTATE 


PAGE 15 


T he Lao Tzu is one of the great anarchist classics.* 0 
No significant philosophical work of either East or 
West has been more thoroughly pervaded by the 
anarchistic spirit. None of the Western political 
thinkers known as major anarchist theorists have possessed a 
sensibility or expressed a world view that is as deeply anar- 
chic as those exhibited in this ancient text. 

Anarchism is known perhaps above all for its uncom- 
promising critique of all forms of domination. Classical 
anarchism* 23 made a considerable contribution to this cri- 
tique through its withering attack on the state and eco- 
nomic exploitation, and through its groundbreaking analy- 
sis of bureaucracy and technological domination. 

More recently, the anarchist critique has expanded 
considerably. With the growth of feminism has come an 
awareness of the centrality of patriarchy to the origin and 
perpetuation of hierarchical society. And the emergence of 
the ecological perspective has led to a careful examination 
of human domination of nature. Contemporary anarchist 
thought deserves recognition for incorporating these ad- 
vances in a much more comprehensive theoretical analy- 
sis. However, an examination of the Lao Tzu reveals that 
over two millennia ago ancient Taoist thought had already 
begun exploring rather profoundly all the dimensions of 
domination that have concerned anarchists over the past 
century and a half. 

While the critique of domination is an important aspect 
of anarchism, even more essential is the underlying posi- 
tive world view that gives direction to the project of social 
transformation. Classical anarchist theory often presented 
a rather inspiring view of human possibilities, and ques- 
tioned certain aspects of the dominant Western world 
view. 

A cooperative, non-dominating society 

But although anarchism exhibited some awareness of a 
need to break with atomistic individualism, metaphysical 
dualism and a mechanist view of nature, none of its major 
exponents inquired deeply into the ontological and ethical 
basis for a cooperative, non-dominating society. Contem- 
porary anarchist theory has begun to fill this gap, as it 
moves toward a more dialectical and holistic anarchism 
that addresses crucial philosophical questions. Especially 
in so far as it is in- 
spired by an ecologi- 
cal perspective, re- 
cent anarchism has 
begun to reconsider 
fundamentally the 
nature of the self, so- 
ciety and nature. It 
has begun to develop 
a dialectical, holistic 
view of reality in 
which the whole 
(whether nature, the 
earth, society or the 
person) is looked 
upon as a unity-in- 
diversity or unity-in- 
difference, and in 
which the develop- 
ment and fulfillment of the part is seen to depend on its 
complex interrelationship with and unfolding within that 
larger whole. 

From such a viewpoint, the good of the natural world as 
a whole is attained as each of the wholes it encompasses_ 
humanity, other species, biomes, ecosystems, bioregion — 
attain their respective goods. Moreover, the good of the 
human community is attained through each person attain- 
ing his or her unique good. And further, the person is seen 
not as an atomized individual, but as a social self, an 
embodiment of our common human nature in its process of 
historical development, and also as the most individual- 
ized and unique self-expression of reality, the most ulti- 
mately creative process. 

The following discussion seeks to show that on almost 
every key point the Lao Tzu is in accord with such a 
dialectical, holistic ecological anarchism. We discover 


first that the work teaches that ultimate reality — Tao — is a 
holistic unity-in-diversity, that it consists of interrelated 
processes of personal and universal self-realization, and 
that it is a system of natural order free from domination. 
Second, we find that the Lao Tzu sees the Taoist virtues of 
compassion, frugality, and non-assertion as the basis for 
an anarchistic, non-authoritarian personality and for cor- 
responding non-dominating social relations. And finally, 
we see that the work’s conception of the ruler-sage is 
founded on an anarchist politics of the anti-political that 
rejects the state, law, and coercion. 

Perhaps the most pervasive theme of the Lao Tzu is its 
vision of an organic unity-in-diversity. One of the most 
powerful metaphors in the work is that of “the Uncarved 
Block” through which we are called back to a deep, 
underlying reality, a primordial truth that humanity has 
largely forgotten. Our customs, our social conditioning, 
our language, in fact the most fundamental categories by 
which we interpret the world, lead us to fragment reality, 
to shatter it violently into a system of disconnected, or, at 
best, externally related objects and egos. A basic problem 
is to create an awareness of the oneness that underlies this 
multiplicity, and to do this without resorting to an illusion- 
ism which denies reality by dissolving plurality into noth- 
ingness. Taoism in no sense seeks an escape from the 
diversity and complexity of the world. On the contrary, its 
unifying vision coexists with an almost Nietzschean affir- 
mation of individuality. 

Yet the concreteness of the Taoist vision goes beyond 
this. The perception of the gap between unity-in-diversity 
and unreconciled division is firmly rooted in historical 
reality. It is essential to understand the Lao Tzu as perhaps 
the most eloquent expression of society’s recollection of 
its lost integrity, an evocation of the condition of whole- 
ness that preceded the rending of the social fabric by 
institutions such as the state, private property, and patriar- 
chy. Significantly, the Lao Tzu encompasses a ringing 
condemnation of all three of these systems, and proposes 
their replacement by institutions much closer to the so- 
cially organic or holistic ones of tribal societies. Just as 
Stanley Diamond has called for an understanding of Plato 
which takes into account his relation to these world- 
historical trans- 
formations (that 
is, as annihilator 
of the remnants 
of tribal values), 
so we should see 
the place of the 
Lao Tzu in this 
conflict (as a re- 
affirmation of 
organic society 
and its values).' 33 

What pre- 
cisely does the 
Lao Tzu say 
about the nature 
of Tao as 
unity?* 43 Often it 
is said to be the 
origin of every- 
thing, that out of which all arises, that on which all things 
depend. It is “the ancestor of all things” (Chan, 4) and “the 
mother of all things.” (Chan, 1) These images can be 
somewhat deceptive if they are taken to imply any separa- 
tion between Tao and the universe. For there is no division: 
Tao is all-inclusive and immanent in the Ten Thousand 
Things. “Analogically, Tao in the world (where every- 
thing is embraced by it), may be compared to riveis and 
streams running into the sea.” (Chan, 32) There is thus a 
unity that underlies the multiplicity of the universe. 

This oneness is not, however, a static unity, but rather 
the unity of the interrelated parts of a creative process. 
This follows from the assertion that Tao consists of both 
being and non being. “All things in the world come from 
being. And being comes from non-being.” (Chan, 40) As 
the opening chapter of the work explains, both being and 
non-being are aspects of Tao, and a full comprehension of 


The Lao Tzu is perhaps the most 
eloquent expression of society’s 
recollection of its lost oneness, 
an evocation of the condition of 
whole which preceded the 
rending of the social fabric by 
institutions like the state, 
private property and patriarchy. 



4 

reality requires knowledge of both the multiplicity of ■ 
existing things and also of the process of generation, the ■ 
emergence from non-being into being: 

4 

“Non-Being’ names this beginning of Heaven and Earth; 
‘Being’ names the mother of the myriad things. 

Therefore, some people constantly dwell in ‘Non-Be- ■ 
ing’ 

Because they seek to perceive its mysteries, 

While some constantly dwell in ‘Being’ 

Because they seek to preserve its boundaries. 

These two [‘Non-Being’ and ‘Being’] are of the same fc 
origin, iA 

But have different names. . . . (Young and Ames) 


This view of Tao immediately brings to mind many « 
similar concepts in both Eastern and Western thought. » 
Notable examples include the distinction in Vedanta be- a 
tween Nirguna and Saguna Brahman, Bohme’s references p 
to the divine Ungrund and Urgrund, and Eckhart’s evoca- k 
tion of a Gottheit that is more primordial than even Gott. R 
There have been numerous attempts to explain the ubiq- a 
uity of this coexistence of negative and positive descrip- 
tion in mystical and organismic thought of many tradi- 
tions. One approach is to stress the fact that in view of the 
inadequacy of our objectifying, delimiting language, real- 


PAGE 16 


FIFTH ESTATE SU 


i ism 



ity can only be grasped by contradictory predications. The 
concept of the ultimate as the totality captures one aspect 
of reality: the oneness of all things. Yet it is necessary to 
speak of the ultimate as nothingness or non-being, inas- 
much as reality is not a mere collection of all things in the 
world, but a unity in which our conventional conceptions 
of “thingness” or individuation are negated/ 5 ’ 

This explains part of what is intended in the Lao Tzu. 
But further, the assertion of the ultimacy of both being and 
non-being is an assault on all static conceptions of reality. 
Taoism should not be confused with forms of organicist 
thought (or pseudo-organicism) that call for “identifica- 
tion” with a timeless, spaceless, motionless One. The 
whole, like each being, is a process of becoming in which 
both being and non-being are ever-present moments. No 
doubt the mystery of birth was a tremendous influence in 
the shaping of this conception. Just as gestation and birth 
are processes through which a being emerges and develops 
out of the vague and mysterious void, so the universe as 
being must arise out of nothingness. Yet this is not to be 
taken in a mere mythological or cosmogonal sense, for the 
process of generation is asserted to be without beginning. 
It is thus an explanation of the enduring structure of 
reality. The process is repeated in the origination and 
development of each being in the universe: 

Man models himself after Earth. 

Earth models itself after Heaven. 

Heaven models itself after Tao. 

And Tao models itself after Nature. (Chan, 25) 


There is thus a macrocosm-microcosm relationship 
between the universal Tao and each being, although this 
relationship in no way negates the individuality and unique- 
ness of each. For in both cases development is a process of 
creative-self realization. 

According to the Lao Tzu, each being has its own Tao, 
in the sense of its own path of self-development and 
unfolding. -While it is true, as David Hall argues, that 
Taoism rejects “principles as transcendent determining 
sources of order, ” (6) and as Roger Ames contends, that it 
negates such “authoritarian determination” as “teleologi- 
cal purpose, divine design, Providence, ” (7) it would be 
incorrect to conclude that Taoism dispenses with all tele- 
ology. In fact, Tao can perhaps be described best as the 
immanent telos of all beings. It is not surprising that 
teleology should seem tainted by authoritarianism, given 
the character of teleological philosophy from Plato and 
Aristotle to Hegel and Marx. But while “orthodox” forms 
of teleological explanation have certainly embodied a 
theoretical will to power and have served to legitimate 
class domination, nationalism, and human exploitation of 
nature, there is no necessary connection between teleology 
and domination. Thus, in the Lao Tzu we find a teleology 
that recognizes that each being has its own unique pro- 
cesses of self-development that should not be imposed 
upon or distorted by external will or force: 

To know harmony means to be in accord with the 
eternal. 

To be in accord with the eternal means to be enlight- 
ened. 

To force the growth of life means ill omen. 

For the mind to employ the vital force without restraint 
means violence. 

After things reach their prime, they begin to grow old. 

Which means being contrary to Tao. 

Whatever is contrary to Tao will soon perish. (Chan, 
55) 

The point is that we should allow each being to follow 
its own ideal pattern of development, which we cannot 
“force,” but only hinder, through our interference. Given 
the accompanying conditions for nurturing such growth, 
a fullness of being will be achieved, after which comes 
inevitable decline and dissolution. The famous Taoist 
image of the “Uncarved Block” expresses the idea of 
wholeness entailed in this self-development. The view of 
D. C. Lau that it means “a state as yet untouched by the 
artificial interference of human ingenuity”* 8 ’ partly misses 
the mark, since it implies that there can somehow be a pure, 
pristine Self independent of human society, and that there 
is something necessarily “artificial” about “human inge- 
nuity.” It is true that “carving the block” means distorting 
the self by interfering with its development according to its 
unique telos, but society does not necessarily have such an 
effect (and is, in fact, a necessary part of attaining such a 
development). 7 

All human development takes place within the context 
of social relationships, and these can be the conditions for 
either self-realization or self-limitation. Consequently, 
“human ingenuity” can be just as much a means of preserv- 
ing the “Uncarved Block” in its uncarved state, as a factor 
in distorting it. Thus, tribal societies that conceive of 
social relations primarily in terms of kinship, and that hold 
a vitalistic or panpsychist view of nature, tend to maintain 
a high degree of awareness of the social and natural roots 
of the self. Civilization, in identifying the self with social 
status (citizenship, class membership, property owner- 
ship, functional role, etc.) reduces the organic social self to 
a narrower individual or abstract ego. The Lao Tzu looks 
backward to the primordial unfragmented society and its 


This essay originally appeared in John Clark’s now out-of-print 
The Anarchist Moment: Reflections on Culture, Nature and 
Power (Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1 984) as “Master Lao 
and the Anarchist Prince.” John is Professor of Philosophy 
and Chair of Environmental Studies at Loyola University, New 
Orleans. He edits the Freeport Watch Bulletin, covering the 
activities of the evil Freeport-McMoRan mining corporation 
from POB 79, Loyola Univ., New Orleans LA 70118. 


social self, just as it points forward to a restored organic 
society and a fully social person. 

In the concept of the organic self, both Taoism and 
contemporary anarchism seek to transcend the narrow 
limits of “the individual.” As Roger Ames notes, in a 
philosophy of organism the person “is understood as a 
matrix of relationships which can be fully expressed only 
by reference to the organismic whole,” and for this reason 
“the expression ‘individual’ might well be ruled altogether 
inappropriate in describing a person.” (9) For similar rea- 
sons there has been a tendency in recent holistic anarchist 
thought to explicitly use the term “individual” to refer to 
that degraded self fabricated over the long history of social 
domination, and finally perfected in modern capitalist, 
statist, technobureaucratic society. The term “person” is 
reserved for the developed social self that can thrive only 
in an organic community embracing humanity and nature. 

A balance between order and chaos 

Tao is thus both an organic unity-in-diversity and the 
ideal path of self-development or unfolding inherent in all 
things. Its third important dimension is in a sense merely 
the synthesis of these two. Given the organic connected- 
ness of all beings, the totality of all processes of self- 
realization constitutes a harmonious system. Tao is thus a 
“natural order” that is manifested in the life of each being 
and in the functioning of the larger community of beings. 
As each being strives to reach its own natural perfection, 
while refraining from the quest to dominate other beings, 
the greatest possible order results. Thus, the Lao Tzu 
proclaims the ironic truth that attempts to control lead to 
disorder, and that as the degree of control becomes more 
extensive, the world becomes more chaotic. 

According to Taoist principles, the order of nature 
depends on a balance between order and chaos. Just as the 
collapse of society into excessive disorder results in tyran- 
nically imposed order, the pursuit of excessively rigid 
order produces disorder beyond the bounds of possible 
control. Spontaneity and order are not opposites, as is 
universally held according to political, technical, and 
economistic rationality, but are rather inseparable aspects 
of the healthy functioning of an organic whole. 

It is on the basis of this analysis that Taoism teaches that 
if each being is permitted to follow its Tao, the needs of all 
can be fulfilled without coercion and domination. Note the 
contrast between the generous and beneficent Tao (the 
gift-giving Creator Spirit of many cultures) and the power- 
crazed, demanding patriarchal authoritarian God 
(Bakunin’s “Monster Divine”), who requires abject sub- 
servience from his creatures: 

All things depend on it for life, and it does not turn away 
from them. 

It accomplishes its task, but does not claim credit for it. 

It clothes and feeds all things but does not claim to be 
master over them. (Chan, 34) 

The Taoist vision penetrates the illusion of inevitable 
natural scarcity (an ideology that arose with the technical, 
political, and economic innovations of civilization), to 
apprehend the abundance of the outpouring of nature. 
Every society founded on domination and struggle within 
society has always perceived the human relation to nature 
as one of struggle, conflict, and conquest. No matter how 
vastly production may increase, scarcity persists or even 
expands. But in the Lao Tzu, as in the consciousness of 
pre-civilized humanity (the gift economy), nature is un- 
derstood to be, rather than a collection of scarce resources, 
an infinite wealth, a plenitude: 

Heaven and earth unite to drip sweet dew. 

Without the command of men, it drips evenly over all. 
(Chan, 32) 

When each follows his or her own Tao, and recognizes 
and respects the Tao in all other beings, a harmonious 
system of self-realization will exist in nature. (At this 
point the Lao Tzu begins to formulate history’s first 

Continued on Next Page 


UMMER 1998 


PAGE 17 


The Tao 
of 

Anarchv 

Continued from Centerfold 

strongly ecological ethics). There is a kind of natural jus- 
tice that prevails, so that the needs of each are fulfilled: 

The Way of Heaven reduces whatever is excessive 
and supplements whatever is insufficient. 

The Way of Man is different. 

It reduces the insufficient to offer to the excessive. 
(Chan, 77) 

According to Lau, in statements such as the above 
“heaven is conceived of as taking an active hand in 
redressing the iniquities of this world,” and “this runs 
counter to the view of the Tao generally to be found in the 
book as something non-personal and amoral.” (10) But 
there is no reason to find such an inconsistency, unless 
one ignores the striking metaphysical consistency of the 
work, and interprets it as a more or less eclectic anthol- 
ogy of traditional wisdom. For if the Tao is an all- 
encompassing natural order, a unity-in-diversity in which 
the immanent telos of each being is in harmony with that 
of all others and of the whole, then there is no need to 
posit any sort of personal agency in the universe respon- 
sible for rectifying injustice. Order and justice are as- 
sured when each being follows its appropriate path of 
development. All other systems of order are mere social 
conventions, and to the degree that they deflect us from 
our natural end, they produce only disorder and injustice: 

Therefore, only when Tao is lost does the doctrine of 
virtue arise. 

When virtue is lost, only then does the doctrine of 
humanity arise. 

When humanity is lost, only then does the doctrine of 
righteousness arise. 

When righteousness is lost, only then does the doc- 
trine of propriety arise. 

Now propriety is a superficial expression of loyalty 
and faithfulness, and the beginning of disorder. (Chan, 
38) 

Insofar as morality means social convention, the Lao 
Tzu advocates a perspective of “amorality.” But to the 
degree that it proposes a way of life founded on universal 
self-realization unrestricted by domination and instru- 
mental rationality, it constitutes one of the most distinc- 
tive and significant moral theories ever propounded. In a 
sense the moral purpose of the Lao Tzu is its central one, 
for the emphasis in the work is never on mere description 
of the nature of things. The inquiry into ultimate reality 
is always firmly embedded in a search for a way of life, 
and a true understanding of the work requires that atten- 
tion be given to the art of living that it describes. Fortu- 
nately, the author summarizes the essentials of this art 
very concisely: 

I have three treasures. 

Guard and keep them: The first is deep love, 

The second is frugality. 

And the third is not to dare to be ahead of the world. 
(Chan, 67) 

While the first Taoist virtue is compassion, some 
passages in the Lao Tzu give the impression that not only 
is love or compassion not virtuous, but even contrary to 
nature. For example: 

Heaven and Earth are not humane (/en). 

They regard all things as straw dogs. 

The sage is not humane. 

He regards all people as straw dogs. (Chan. 5) 


In asserting that the enlightened person regards all 
people as straw dogs — worthless ritual objects — the au- 
thor seems to be rejecting both humanism and compas- 
sion. But this is only half true. While the Lao Tzu is 
predicated on a certain kind of anti-humanism (in fact, 
this is one of its great strengths), this does not imply a 
denial of the importance of compassion. Rather, it is only 
through a rejection of “humanism” in the sense of 
anthropocentrism that the greatest possible compassion 
can arise. To act “humanely” means, at worst, merely 
accepting the conventions of society concerning moral- 
ity and goodness, and implies, at best, remaining within 
the biased perspective of species self-interest. To tran- 
scend this “humane” outlook means, as Chan says, to be 
“impartial, to have no favorites,” 00 but not in the sense 
of complete detachment. Rather, it is the im -partiality 
that results from identification with the whole, an impar- 
tiality that allows one to respect all beings and value their 
various goods. 00 For this reason it is possible to assert 
that “the Sage has no fixed (personal) ideas. He regards 
the people’s ideas as his own,” (Chan, 49) and that “he 
has no personal interests.” (Chan, 7) 

The person who comprehends Tao is able to take the 
perspective of the other, and to overcome the egoism 
which treats the good of each as antagonistic to that of the 
other. This is one of the implications of the famous 
passage stating that: 


[H]e who values the world as his body may be en- 
trusted with the empire. 



He who loves the world as his body may be entrusted 
with the empire. (Chan, 13) 

Some commentators have stressed the implicit ap- 
proval of a kind of selfishness in the concept of concern 
for one’s body. 00 There is an element of truth in this 
view, for unless one fully affirms his or her own exist- 
ence and process of self-realization, there is no possibil- 
ity of truly valuing other beings or of affirming reality. 
But a further important implication of the passage is that 
one should identify with the whole. Realizing one’s own 
Tao is identical with participation in the universal Tao. 
Thus, all self-realization — one’s own and that of all 
others is valued by one who understands Tao. Compas- 
sion arises from a “self love” that has nothing to do with 
egoism. 

The way of life advocated in th tLao Tzu is thus based 
on love, respect, and compassion for all beings. If such a 
life is to be lived, one must understand the bounds of 
one’s own Tao: what is essential to one’s own self- 
realization, what is unnecessary, and what undermines it 
and that of others. The Lao Tzu expresses this idea in its 


teaching that one should seek simplicity and frugality, 
and avoid luxury, extravagance, and excess. 

Some interpretations of the Lao Tzu hold that it advo- 
cates “asceticism.” If this term is defined as a kind of 
self-denial or self-sacrifice for the sake of some higher 
Good, then the truth is just the contrary. And even if it is 
construed as a kind of “renunciation” (as it has some- 
times unfortunately been translated) for the sake of one’s 
own spiritual growth, this misses the point somewhat. 
The life of “simplicity” is in no way the impoverished 
life of one who seeks escape from the corrupt world and 
its temptations. Rather it is something much more affir- 
mative: it is the consummate existence of one who has 
rejected whatever would stunt or distort growth and 
personal fulfillment. 

Simplicity is not, however, a quality with implica- 
tions for personal life alone. It refers also to social 
institutions which will promote rather than hinder self- 
realization. A society based on social status, or one 
glorifying the pursuit of material wealth and permitting 
economic domination, is inevitably destructive, produc- 
ing conflict, disorder, envy, and crime: 

Do not exalt the worthy, so that the people will not 
compete. 

Do not value rare treasures, so that the people shall not 
steal. 

Do not display objects of desire, so that the people’s 
hearts shall not be disturbed. (Chan, 3) 

Rather, we should “discard profit.” (Chan, 19) But in 
doing so, we are losing nothing, for the pursuit of wealth 
and social status only distracts one from the essential 
task of following one’s authentic way. Just as the New 
Testament asks “what would anyone gain by winning the 
whole world but losing his own life,” (Matt. 16:26, Mk. 
8:36) so the Lao Tzu places in question the value of 
wealth and prestige: 

Which does one love more, fame or one’s own life? 

Which is more valuable, one’s own life or wealth? 

He who hoards most will lose heavily. (Chan, 44) 

But wealth and luxury are not condemned only be- 
cause of their spiritually debilitating quality. There is 
also a recognition that they are unjust and contrary to the 
order of nature. The Lao Tzu attacks the institutions of 
civilization on the grounds that whereas nature “reduces 
whatever is excessive and supplements what is insuffi- 
cient,” human society “reduces the insufficient to offer 
to the excessive.” (Chan, 77) The criticism of political 
and economic institutions is sometimes made quite ex- 
plicit: 


The courts are exceedingly splendid. 

While the fields are exceedingly weedy. 

And the granaries are exceedingly empty. 

Elegant clothes are worn, 

Sharp weapons are carried. 

Foods and drinks are enjoyed beyond limit. 

And wealth and treasures are accumulated in excess. 
This is robbery and extravagance. 

This is indeed not Tao (the way). (Chan, 53) 

While this attack on economic and social inequity 4 
seems fully in accord with the anti-hierarchical Taoist 
outlook, it might seem strange to some that the Lao Tzu 
would go so far as to launch an attack or. know ledge and 
wisdom in the name of simplicity ' Why would a work 
which itself attempts to transmit wisdom aboci life, and 
which has traditionally been atmbeied to an Sage. - 
counsel one to 'abandon sagehnrss and discard wis- 
dom?” (Chan. 191 The truth co nv e ye d is not as obscure 
as it might appear ininaBy . In sm erase society , knowl- 
edge (like arLreiipcc. -adreemes is tanegncec - 2*0 the 


We should “ discard profit ” But in doing so, we are losing 
nothing , for the pursuit of wealth and social status only 
distracts one from the essential task of following one’s 
authentic way , 


PAGE 18 


FIFTH ESTATE SUMMER 1998 


life of the community, rather than reified as a possession 
of the privileged members of a hierarchical institution. 
The Lao Tzu is attacking knowledge as the property of an 
elite intelligentsia or a class of literati. Just as material 
wealth sets one against another and seduces people away 
from their natural good, so knowledge will do likewise if 
it is reduced to a means of amassing power: 

True wisdom is different from much learning; 

Much learning means little wisdom. 

The sage has no need to hoard; 

When his own last scrap has been used up on behalf of 
others, 

Lo, he has more than before! (Waley) 

A final important implication of the concept of sim- 
plicity is that certain forms of technology should be 
rejected and that technical efficiency must not be ac- 
cepted uncritically as a justification for social change. 
The Lao Tzu exhibits an awareness that technological 
development, which has always been justified as fulfill- 
ing human needs, may in fact be destructive of human 
self-realization and of the social institutions most con- 
ducive to it. It expresses a well-founded fear that danger- 
ous artificial wants and desires may be created, and that 
complex, hierarchical social institutions, accompanied 
by egoism, inequality, and disorder may arise. Conse- 
quently, the community should reject such technology 
and preserve its simplicity: 

Given a small country with few inhabitants, he could 
bring it about that though there should be among the 
people contrivances requiring ten times, a hundred times 
less labor, he would not use them. (Waley) 

There is nothing in the Taoist view that implies that 
new non-dominating forms of technology should be 
rejected. But given the fact that actual technical innova- 
tion in the epoch of the Lao Tzu in fact served the 
purposes of power and control (as it does in our own day), 
it is not surprising that the work should emphasize the 
need for a more critical approach to technological change. 

Another important theme that runs throughout the Lao 
Tzu is the necessity of avoiding competition and other 
forms of self-assertive and aggressive action. What is 
proposed instead is “non-action” or “actionless 
action”('w«-H'ei), activity which is in accord with one’s 
own Tao and with those of all others. Since one achieves 
the good life by following one’s own unique path, there 
is no point in striving to place oneself “above” others. In 
fact, to do so is self-destructive, since in competing we 
subordinate ourselves to some external standard of good- 
ness, virtue, or success. Even if we “win,” we are de- 
feated, since we have conformed to the alien values of 
those whom we have vanquished. Competition conflicts 
with Taoism’s “polycentric” viewpoint, as David Hall 
calls it. Such a viewpoint emphasizes individuality and 
the uniqueness of each being, and excludes individual- 
ism, which is necessarily a comparative and competitive 
mentality. The Taoist sage will therefore “succeed” 
through eschewing the quest for power and prestige: 

He does not show himself; therefore he is luminous. 

He does not justify himself; therefore he becomes 
prominent. 

He does not boast of himself; therefore he is given 
credit. 

He does not brag; therefore he can endure for long. 

It is precisely because he does not compete that the 
world cannot compete with him. (Chan, 22) 

In describing such a non-aggressive, non-dominating 
personality, the Lao Tzu continually resorts to images of 
the female and the child. Roger Ames correctly notes that 
the Taoist advocates a form of androgyny in which “the 
masculine and feminine gender traits are integrated in 
some harmonious and balanced relationship.” <16) This is 
the clear implication of the statement that: 

He who knows the male (active force) and keeps to the 
female (the passive force or receptive element) 

Becomes the ravine of the world. (Chan, 28) 

The concept of rigidly defined sex roles is totally alien 
to the Taoist sensibility, since this implies subordinating 


the unique person to social convention, and denying the 
diversity of human nature. It is another example of 
cutting the “Uncarved Block,” or interfering brutally 
with Tao. 

But there is a good reason why, in spite of its 
androgynism, the Lao Tzu should stress heavily the 
importance of the female. For it is launching a direct (if 
non-aggressive!) attack on one of history’s most en- 
trenched and enduring systems of domination: patriar- 
chy. Under a patriarchal system there is little need to 
emphasize the value of “masculine” qualities. What is 
required is a vehement defense of the “feminine.” Fur- 



When the great Tao is forgotten, 
goodness and piety appear. 

When the body’s intelligence 
declines, 

cleverness and knowledge step 
forth. 

When there is no peace in the 
family, 

filial piety begins. 

When the country falls into chaos, 
patriotism is born. 

Throw away holiness and wisdom, 
and people will be a hundred times 
happier. 

Throw away morality and justice, 
and people will do the right thing. 
Throw away industry and profit, 
and there won’t be any thieves. 

— Tao Te Ching 

thermore, while it is true that “masculine” qualities are 
recognized in the Lao Tzu to be of value, those usually 
stereotyped by most societies as “feminine” seem in fact 
to be the more essential ones to the Taoist perspective. In 
a revealing passage, creativity and love (in the non- 
possessive “maternal” sense) are identified as “femi- 
nine”: 

Can you understand all and penetrate all without 
taking any action? 

To produce things and to rear them, 

To produce, but not to take possession of them. 

To act, but not to rely on one’s own ability. 


To lead them, but not to master them — 

This is called profound and secret virtue (hsuan-te). 
(Chan, 10) 

In a Taoist community, people are permitted to de- 
velop according to their own Tao, so that to the extent 
that “masculinity” and “femininity” exist (as contrast- 
ing, but not opposed qualities), they are spontaneous and 
natural. An infinite variety in combinations of qualities 
might occur. Without imposed sex roles, an anarchistic, 
non-prescriptive androgyny is the ideal. However, if we 
limit our consideration to the strictly opposed sex roles 
of patriarchal society, no reconciliation of the antagonis- 
tic roles is possible, and the “feminine” must be selected 
as being closer to the ideal. 

For similar reasons Taoism often presents the child as 
the model of virtue. This is also heretical from the 
perspective of patriarchal societies. Since virtuousness 
is conventionally identified with the power and status of 
the adult male, the recommendation that adults emulate 
infants appears ludicrous at best. Yet for anti-patriarchal 
Taoism, the child has two essential qualities in abun- 
dance: non-aggressiveness and spontaneity. While in a 
society based on hierarchical power, strength is valued 
greatly as a personal characteristic, in the Taoist society 
founded on “natural order” and unity-in-difference one 
should seek “the highest degree of weakness like an 
infant.” (Chan, 10) The infant is not ruled by inordinate 
desires, such as the longing for power, wealth, status, or 
luxury. Instead, all actions are natural and spontaneous. 
As the Lao Tzu states in an irrefutable argument: 

He may cry all day without becoming hoarse, 

This means that his (natural) harmony is perfect. 
(Chan, 55) 

Just as in nature the softest and weakest thing, water, 
can overcome the hardest obstacle, so softness and weak- 
ness are the most effective qualities in personal develop- 
ment. Softness characterizes the organic, while hardness 
is typical of the inorganic and mechanistic. Rigidity, 
both mental and physical, is an attribute of the authoritar- 
ian. Rigid muscles and rigid categories are two closely 
related armaments in the futile battle to stop the flow of 
reality. As Wilhelm Reich explains, “character armor” is 
the means by which the authoritarian personality seeks to 
avoid the threat of feeling and experiencing too much. (l7) 
The Lao Tzu states the same point: 

When a man is born, he is tender and weak. 

At death he is stiff and hard. 

All things, the grass as well as trees, are tender and 
supple while alive. 

When dead, they are withered and dried. 

Therefore the stiff and the hard are companions of 
death. 

The tender and weak are companions of life. (Chan, 
76) 

What then can be said of a society obsessed with 
economic and political power, a society riddled with 
bureaucratic and technocratic organization, a society 
convinced that “security” comes from military strength 
(in short, of civilization in its most advanced state)? 
From the Taoist viewpoint such a society is striving to 
reduce people to a condition of living death. Our society, 
even more than the one existing in the era of the Lao Tzu , 
possesses all the qualities that are the target of the work’s 
devastating attack. It illustrates well how a holistic, 
organicist philosophy implies an anarchist critique of 
both the institutions of an inorganic society based on 
power relations and of the character structures that pre- 
vail in such a society 

In view of this critique, it is true, as Roger Ames 
argues, that Taoism should not be judged “quietistic,” as 
it often is when its discussion of the feminine, the 
childlike, weakness, and softness are not analyzed care- 
fully. (,8) When power is combated by means of its own 
methods (“strength”), power inevitably prevails, no mat- 
ter which side is victorious. But despite its rejection of 
aggressiveness, Taoism does not propose a quietistic 
withdrawal from the world. Rather, it contends that the 
foundations of power can be undermined by “rivers and 
streams flowing to the sea.” (Chan, 32) By this is meant 
the liberation of other powers — the powers of self-real- 


SUMMER 1998 FIFTH ESTATE 


PAGE 19 




The people starve because the ruler eats too much tax 
grain. . . . 

They are difficult to rule because their ruler does too 
many things. (Chan, 75) 


ization — of both humanity and nature. 

In spite of all its anti-authoritarianism, one might 
conclude that what the Lao Tzu advocates is at best 
quasi-anarchistic, in view of the fact that the work is 
explicitly addressed to the ruler, and because the exist- 
ence of the state is accepted. While Roger Ames argues 
for the coherence of the idea of Taoist anarchism, he 
contends that the Lao Tzu does not fully adopt this 
position, since it “sees the state as a natural institution, 
analogous perhaps to the family. 09 ’ Frederic Bender goes 
even further, concluding that the work is “hardly anar- 
chistic in the Western sense, since it retains, albeit in 
improved form, ruler, rule, and the means of rule (the 
state). ” (20) 

But in fact the Lao Tzu dispenses with all of these, if 
they are taken in their political sense. Its major diver- 
gence from classical Western anarchism is that, given its 
more thorough rejection of patriarchy, technological 
domination, and domination of nature, and given the 
greater coherence of its metaphysical foundations, the 
Lao Tzu is more consistently anarchistic. In fact the Lao 
Tzu expresses an entirely negative view of government. 
It is true that occasionally it sounds as if only the 
excesses of political control are condemned: 


If the Lao Tzu is correct, then the more laws there are, the 
more disorganized society will be; the more prisons are 
built, the more crime will increase; the more bureaucracy 
proliferates and experts are trained, the more social 
problems are aggravated; the more military power ex-, 
pands, the more conflicts occur and the more the threat of 
destruction looms larger. (Consequences such as these 
are predicted in Chapters 57 and 58 of the Lao Tzu.) And 
these have in fact been precisely the results of the politi- 
cal organization of society. Every expansion of political 
domination for the sake of maintaining order has only 
further destroyed the organic structure of society, thus 
advancing social disintegration and producing more 
deeply rooted disorder. 

But can the proposed alternative to political society, a 
non-authoritarian, cooperative society, possibly exist? 
Frederic Bender thinks that it cannot, although it is not 
entirely clear what it is that he considers impossible (a 
non-coercive social system, a society “lacking entirely 


Such a passage might be taken to mean 
rulers would tax less and control people less, 
context of the work’s overall perspective “good rule” can 
only mean “no rule,” that is, ruling without such 
sures as taxation and control. The idea of governmental 
“abuse” is absurd from the standpoint of the Lao Tzu, in 
view of the fundamental and absolute nature of its cri- 
tique of government. As the ego is to the organic self, so 
is political society to the organic community. In both 
cases the Lao Tzu uses the image of the carving of the 
block: 


Without law or compulsion, men would dwell in 
harmony. 

Once the block is carved, there will be names. (Waley) 


“Naming” refers to reifying dynamic processes, de- 
stroying natural unity, and reducing the organic to the 


The more laws there are, the more disorganized 
society will be; the more prisons are built, the more 
crime will increase; the more bureaucracy proliferates 
and experts are trained, the more social problems are 
aggravated; the more military power expands, the more 
conflicts occur and the more the threat of destruction 
looms larger. 


inorganic. And this is indeed the transformation that took 
place with the rise of the state. The organic, holistic 
community was divided or “cut up” into a society of 
classes, of rulers and ruled, of rich and poor, of elites and 
masses, and, finally, of individuals contending for power, 
or, at worst, mere “survival.” The Lao Tzu shows an acute 
awareness of the contrast between previous organic soci- 
ety and existing political society, an awareness that must 
have been heightened by the intense degree of strife 
prevailing in its time. Yet the central objection to govern- 
ment is metaphysical: it is a distortion of reality, a 
destruction of the natural order of society, the replace- 
ment of Taoist “non-action” by control and domination. 

Government, ruling, and domination are the sources 
of disorder. This is the political message of the Lao Tzu: 

The people are difficult to keep in order because those 
above them interfere. 

This is the only reason why they are so difficult to 
keep in order. (Waley) 

What is strange is not this seemingly paradoxical 
statement, but rather the fact that after over two thousand 
years of evidence to support it, it still seems paradoxical. 


in institutionalized authority,” a “social organism” with- 
out “someone exercising authority,” or a society practic- 
ing “unanimous direct democracy”)' 21 ’ He argues that the 
fact that such societies never existed is evidence that they 
are not possible. However, there have indeed been soci- 
eties without “institutional authority” in the sense of a 
separate, permanent stratum of officials holding coer- 
cive power. Bender cites the existence of the authority of 
“elders, chiefs, shamans, and the like” as evidence for 
“systems of authority” in all societies.' 22 ’ But to really 
understand the relevance of these phenomena to anar- 
chism, it is necessary to analyze care fully the meaning 
of “authority” in each case and the sense in which it 
constitutes a “system.” 

Anthropology presents us with abundant evidence 
that “authority” in tribal society differs radically from 
that of political society. To give just one example, while 
the “chief’ is often assumed by the European mind to be 
a political ruler, in fact, he (or sometimes she) has often 
been primarily a ritual figure, or one with carefully 
delineated, non-coercive functions dealing with specific 
areas of group life. Discussions of societies without 
states or authoritarian political structures have been 
discussed at length in works such as Evans-Pritchard's 


The Nuer, Levi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques , Tait and 
Middleton’s Tribes Without Rulers, Dorothy Lee's Free- 
dom and Culture, and, above all, Pierre Clastres’ Society 
Against the State . (23) Clastres’ conclusions based on the 
study of many Amerindian tribes are especially striking: 

"One is confronted, then, by a vast constellation of 
societies in which the holders of what elsewhere would 
be called power are actually without power; where the 
political is determined as a domain beyond coercion and 
violence, beyond hierarchical subordination; where, in a 
word, no relation of command-obedience is in force.” 124 ’ 

To say that such societies have existed is certainly not 
to say that they fully embody the anti-authoritarian ideal 
of anarchism. Yet an exploration of the nature of.organic 
societies of the past serves to show what was lost with the 
rise of civilization, and what might be regained in a more 
self-conscious form in the future. It also helps us under- 
stand that there are many kinds of authority, and that 
some imply neither membership in a special office- 
holding group possessing coercive power, nor even 
“authoritarianism” in any sense. 

The Taoist ruler-sage is an example of one who 
exercises such non-dominating authority. This authority 
is, however, much closer to the anarchist ideal than is that 
of the tribal chief or elder. For whereas these figures 
often have no personal power at all, they may serve as 
vehicles through whom the restrictive force of tradition 
is transmitted. The Taoist ruler, on the other hand, im- 
poses nothing on others, and refuses to legitimate his or 
her authority through the external supports of either law 
or tradition. 

The Lao Tzu teaches that people should not (and, in 
fact, cannot) be coerced into doing “the right thing.” This 
follows from the internal-development, immanent-good 
teleology of Taoism (which is opposed to the hierarchi- 
cal-good teleology of Aristotle, the external-good tele- 
ology of utilitarianism, and the transcendent-good tele- 
ology of many Western religious views, for example). 
The sage does not attempt to legislate or require the 
good: 

I take no action and the people of themselves are 
transformed. 

I love tranquillity and the people of themselves be- 
come correct. 

I engage in no activity and the people of themselves 
become prosperous. 

I have no desires and the people of themselves become 
simple. (Chan, 57) 

In view of this conception of the true ruler as one who 
does not interfere with the development of others, there 
is no reason to think that the sage is what is called in 
political terminology a “ruler.” As Lau notes, “the sage 
is first and foremost a man who understands the Tao, and 
if he happens also to be a ruler he can apply his under- 
standing of the Tao to government.” 125 ’ To this it must be 
added, first, that the anti-patriarchal Lao Tzu never im- 
plies that only men can be sages, and, secondly, that its 
application of “understanding of Tao” to government 
means not governing. Attempts to interpret the Lao Tzu 
as a manual of strategy in the “art of governing” inevita- 
bly fail. They require a rather extreme literal-mindedness, 
in which “ruling” must always mean holding political 
office, and “weapons” must always mean military, rather 
than spiritual arms. 126 ’ The meaning attributed torulership 
in the Lao Tzu is clear: it is the “nobility” that comes from 
identification with Tao, and with successfully following 
one’s path of self-realization: 

To know the eternal is called enlightenment. 

Not to know the eternal is to act blindly and to result 
in disaster. 

He who knows the eternal is all-embracing. 

Being all-embracing, he is impartial. 

Being impartial, he is kingly (universal). (Oaa, 16) 

The power of the ruler is thus not political: it comes 
from the force of example alone. It is for this ieasoo that 
the Lao Tzu can assert that "the best (rulers) are those 
whose existence is (merely* fcno»^ by the people.*' 
(Chan, 17) In fact, in several verswcs of -he ter: :be best 
rulers are “not** knowr by the peccfee.” Pres~*My, 
they are not known as refers or leaders n re wintry 
sense, although they are Lac»r as models x personal 


PAGE 20 


FIFTH ESTATE SUMMER 1998 



Anarchist Black Cross is a support 
network for political victims 
of the state 


Jailed 
Anarchist 
Activist 
Framed 

in Texas Prisons 

by Scott Lamson 
Philadelphia Anarchist 

Chris Plummer, an anti-racist, anarchist 
activist imprisoned in Texas, is facing a 
frame-up by jail authorities and death 
threats from neo-nazis. 

After being involved with the squatting 
movement on New York’s Lower East Side 
in the late 80’s and early 90’s, Plummer 
traveled the country. During this time, he 
and others formed the United Anarchist 
Front, a group designed to confront capi- 
talist and oppressive institutions. He was 
convicted in 1 993 for his part in an action 
against a Nazi-skinhead house in Houston 
after police found his fingerprints at the 


The goal was stopping the American 
Front, an openly fascist group proud of its 
record of extreme violence, from spread- 
ing propaganda in neighborhoods and 
schools. There were no injuries in the 
attack, and only Nazi hate literature was 
destroyed. Still, Chris faced several 
charges including attempted murder. This 
was dropped after Chris would not turn in 
his friends, but he was convicted on bur- 
glary charges. 

Chris did not stop his organizing efforts 
after being jailed. The T exas prison system 
has a well justified reputation of being a 
maelstrom of hate, terror and exploitation. 
Encouraging conflict between different 
races is one way control is maintained by 
the prison authorities. In spite of this envi- 
ronment, Chris set up Cell One, a prisoner 
organization at the Huntsville facility, home 
of Texas’s notorious Death Row. Cell One’s 


main project was the Texas Prisoners’ 
Anarchist Lending Library. 

Organizations such as Books-Through- 
Bars in Philadelphia, Books-To-Prisoners 
in Seattle, plus many individuals donated 
books to the project. Prison authorities and 
white supremacist prison gangs alike felt 
threatened by a library providing radical 
and progressive literature by and about 
African-Americans, Chicanos, Native 
Americans and poor/working-class whites. 

In March 1997, under the pretext of a 
“gang activity” investigation, guards con- 
fiscated and then “lost” all of the books as 
well as many of Chris’ personal posses- 
sions. At the same time, intimidation and 
attacks from a Nazi prisoner gang esca- 
lated into a murderous assault in which 
Chris had his jaw and cheekbone broken 
and barely escaped death. 

In May 1997, he was transferred to the 
Gatesville prison facility where Chris re- 
ported that racial tension and general vio- 
lence was rampant. The Texas Depart- 
ment of Criminal Justice chose this unit 
knowing that a paid “hit” was out on Chris’ 
life by Nazi prison gangs. Shortly after the 
transfer, he was put in administrative seg- 
regation and in August was attacked by 
guards in retaliation for speaking out in 
support of another prisoner. 

After Chris contacted outside groups 
and threatened legal action to expose the 
threats to the other inmate, guards seized 
and destroyed ail his property including 
valuable legal material. He was told he was 
under suspicion for a conspiracy to smuggle 
guns into the prison — a blatant frame-up. 

For days afterwards, Chris endured re- 


peated strip and cell searches. In his own 
words: “I have been pulled out of my cell an 
average of 1 3 times per 8-hour shift. I have 
not had a solid hour’s sleep in 3 days. They 
refuse to allow me to even have stamps or 
writing materials. And I have no doubt they 
will carry out some of their threats.” 

Chris’ mail is heavily censored and let- 
ters to and from some of his support groups 
have been seized as “gang-related.” Worse, 
Chris was visited by Bureau of Alcohol 
Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) agents in 
October and told gun smuggling charges 
will be filed against him. A conviction could 
result in a 40 year sentence. 

Chris has declared to me that he “will 
not do a day of (the jail term). If I’m con- 
victed of this new charge; I will hunger 
strike to the end— that’s that.” 

We must defend Chris and halt this 
torturous injustice, not just because Chris’ 
life is on the line, but because if we ignore 
his plight, our own struggles will be that 
much weaker. 

What you can do: 

Please write and call the following: 

Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Fire- 
arms attn: Charles Meyer, 9009 Mountain 
Ridge Dr., Austin TX; 78759 (512) 349- 
4545; 

Wayne Scott, Director TDC, P.O. Box 
99, Huntsville TX 77342; (409) 295-6371 

Demand that the charges against Chris 
Plummer, #677345, be dropped, that 
threats and harassment be stopped, and 
insist his stolen property be returned. 

Chris is desperately searching for a 
lawyer. If you can help, provide funds to 
cover legal costs, or need more infor- 
mation, please contact: 

Chris Plummer Support Group, c/o M.L., 
271 E.IOth St. #47, New York, N.Y. 10009 
(212) 505-8014 
Stay in touch with Chris at: 

Christopher Lee Plummer #677345, 
HughesXlnit Rt. 2, Box 4400, Gatesville TX 
76597 ' 

ABC Books to 
Prisoners Program 

Through its Books to Prisoners pro- 
gram, Detroit ABC provides anarchist and 
general interest titles to locked down com- 
rades. Donations of quality paperbacks 


are needed (hardcovers usually aren’t al- 
lowed in prisons) to meet numerous re- 
quests from prisoners. We especially en- 
courage publishers and bookstores to con-* 
tribute seconds or damaged books. We 
also need shipping and packing material 
and stamps to help defray the cost of mail- 
ing the books. 

Requests for books or donations to the 
project can be sent to Detroit ABC, c/o Fifth 
Estate, 4632 Second Ave., Detroit Ml 
48201. 

ABC has sent a donation of books to the 
prisoner library listed below, and will for- 
ward titles sent by Fifth Estate readers. 

Greetings: 

Unfortunately, many prisoners and my- 
self are slammed (locked down) for our 
refusal to work. But, I’d rather be sitting on 
my ass in my cell than working for these 
capitalist slavers! 

The imprisoned anarchist comrades and 
myself are starting an anarchist lending 
library and we’re inspired. Though I’ve been 
doing this for a couple of years now, I’d like 
to broaden our collection of literature. It 
would be appreciated if you could send us 
a bit of everything from the anarchist mi- 
lieu. Please let people know the return 
address must be that of a publisher or 
bookstore. 

Chris “Spit” Gross 

P.O. Box 7000 

Carson City NV 89702 

Send letters of support and your pub- 
lications to the following imprisoned 
anarchist victims of the state: 

The Gandalf Defendants: Saxon Burchall- 
Wood, #CK4322, HMP Guys Marsh, 
Shaftsbury, Dorest, SP7 0AH, UK, Noel 
Molland, #CK4321, HMP Channings Wood, 
Densbury, Newton Abbot, Devon TQq2 6DW, 
UK and Stephen Booth, #CK4323, HMP 
Lancaster Castle, Lancaster, LAI 1YL, UK. 

Harold Thompson, Harold Thompson 
Support Campaign, c/o Raze the Walls, 
PO Box 22774, Seattle WA 98122-0774. 

For a “Workers & Prisoners Basic Study 
Guide,” write: Black Autonomy Collective, 
323 Broadway E. #91 4, Seattle WA 981 02. 


The Tao of 

Anarchy 

* 

Continued from Page 20 

development. In either case a subtle, non- 
coercive authority is attributed to the ruler. 
There is nothing in this kind of authority 
that is contrary to anarchism. It is neither 
imposed on anyone nor used to manipu- 
late. 

On the contrary, it is the result of the 
most non-aggressive activity, and can only 
exist if “the people,” seeing the sage fol- 
lowing the path of non-dominating self- 
realization, freely choose to do likewise. 

Thus, the Lao Tzu does not propose the 
continuation of traditional political au- 
thority, but instead its replacement by 
natural authority. The “empire” that is 
ruled by the sage is not the political state, 
but rather the natural order that is attained 
by the affirmation of one’s own Tao and 
that of all other beings. 

The Lao Tzu proclaims implicitly what 
is stated explicitly in the Huai Nan Tzu: 
“Possessing the empire” means “self-re- 
alization.” a8) 


Notes 

(1 ) The Lao Tzu or Tao te Ching is one of the 
great philosophical classics of world literature. 
T aoism, which takes much of its mspiration from 
the work, is (with Confucianism and Buddhism) 
one of the three great traditions of thought and 
practice spanning much of the history of Chi- 
nese civilization. The Lao Tzu has overthe ages 
appealed to diverse groups of readers. Some 
have found in it philosophical enlightenment: 
others, a path to mystical experience; and still 
others, knowledge of the means for personal 
growth. In recent years, many Western readers 
have given it more careful attention, as the 
growth of ecological consciousness has uncov- 
ered fatal limitations in Western views of nature, 
and the Taoist philosophy of nature has been 
looked to as a more adequate alternative. 

(2) By “classical" anarchism I mean the tra- 
dition associated closely with the international 
workers' movement. This tradition began in the 
mutualism of the French labor movement of the 
1840’s, spread across much of Europe and 
Latin America by the early 20th century in the 
form of anarcho-communism and, especially, 
anarcho-syndicalism, and ended with the pre- 
cipitous decline of anarcho-syndicalism after 
the defeat of the Spanish Revolution in the late 
1930's. 

(3) “Plato and the Defense of the Primitive” in 
In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civiliza- 
tion (New Brunswick: T ransaction Books, 1 974), 
pp. 176-202. 

(4) References to the Lao Tzu in the text will 
cite the translator and the number of the chapter 
cited. The following translations and commen- 
taries are cited in the text: Wing-T sit Chan . “The 
Lao Tzif in A Source Book in Chinese Philoso- 


phy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 
1963), which will be the primary source cited; 
R.B. Blakney, The Way of Life (New York: New 
American Library, 1955); RhettY.W. Young and 
Roger T. Ames, Lao Tzu: Text, Notes, and 
Comments (by Ch'en Ku-ying) (Taiwan: Chi- 
nese Materials Center, 1981); D.C. Lau, Lao 
Tzu: Tao te Ching (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: 
Penguin Books, 1 963); and Arthur Waley, The 
Way and Its Power: A Study of the Tao te Ching 
and Its Place in Chinese Thought (New York: 
Grove Press, 1958). 

(5) Cf. John Findlay, “The Logic of Mysti- 
cism” in Religious Studies (1972). 

(6) David Hall, “The Metaphysics of Anar- 
chism,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 10 (1 983): 
58-59. 

(7) Roger Ames, “Is Political Taoism Anar- 
chism?" in Ibid., p. 34. 

(8) Lau, p. 36. 

(9) Ames, pp. 31, 30. 

(10) Lau, p. 24. 

(11) Chan, p. 142. 

(12) See Holmes Welch's excellent discus- 
sion of this passage in Taoism: The Parting of 
the Way (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 44- 
45. 

(13) See Lau, p. 40, and Waley, pp. 1 57-1 58. 

(14) I say “inequity" in an effort to stress that 
Taoism does not advocate “equality,” but rather 
a system of values in which equality and in- 
equality have no meaning. 

(15) A reductive simplification is often the 
result of the growth of complex, inorganic social 
institutions. The social self has the kind of rich 
complexity that is the goal of Taoist “simplicity." 

(16) Roger Ames, T aoism and the Androgy- 
nous Idea," in Historical Reflections/Reflexions 
Historiques 8 (1981): 43. 


(17) See Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychol- 
ogy of Fascism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 
1970). 

(18) This is the case with Murray Bookchin’s 
“anarchist” and “social ecological” attacks on 
Taoism. With a condescending assurance of 
Taoism’s theoretical incoherence and political 
ineffectuality, this champion of Western ratio- 
nality parodies its philosophical content, reck- 
lessly quotes passages out of context, and re- 
writes history selectively. 

(19) Ames, “Political Taoism,” p. 35. 

(20) Frederic Bender, “Taoism and Western 
Anarchism: A Comparative Study,” in Journal of 
Chinese Philosophy 1 0 (1983): 12. 

(21) Ibid., p. 22. 

(22) Ibid. 

(23) E.E. Evans- Pritchard. The Nuer (Lon- 
don: Oxford University Press, 1940); Claude 
Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York: 
Pocket Books, 1977); David Tait and John 
Middleton, Tribes Without Rulers (London: 
Routledgeand Kegan Paul, 1958); Dorothy Lee, 
Freedom and Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 
Prentice Hall, 1959); Pierre Clastres, Society 
Against the State: The Leader as Servant and 
the Humane Uses of Power Among the Indians 
of the Americas (New York: Urizen Books, 1977). 

(24) Clastres, p. 5. 

(25) Lau, p. 32. 

(26) For some of the Lao Tzi/s fascinating 
insights on the nature of war and self-defense, 
see chapters 31 , 36 and 69. 

(27) Chan, p. 148. 

(28) Cited in Ames, “Political Taoism,” p. 36. 

Chinese characters from The Essence of 
Tai Chi Ch’uan: The Literary Tradition, Ben- 
jamin Pang Jeng Lo, et al, North Atlantic Books. 


SUMMER 1998 FIFTH ESTATE 


PAGE 21 




"This is what we're in Vietnam protecting? 

— from Winter Soldiers: An Oral His- 

Veterans Against the 

War i^H 


Continued on Page 28 


conflict and the U.S. role in it. The public 
then listened to these veterans — loud and 
clear. 

In January 1971, the WAW convened 
a “Winter Soldier Investigation” in De- 
troit with the intent of documenting to the 
public what they knew, had seen and par- 
ticipated in. Their testimony vividly in- 
dicted the U.S. political and military lead- 
ership that trained and sent them to Viet- 
nam. In the summer of 1972, representa- 
tives of the WAW traveled to the Bertrand 
Russell War Crimes Tribunal in Paris 
where they further testified, and embraced 
the “enemy” they had once fought. 

The anti-war vets established direct 
contacts with the Vietnamese and declared 
their own peace with documents such as 
with the Peoples Peace Treaty. 

The book also documents several jour- 
neys by Vietnam veterans to North Viet- 
nam during the war and the relationship 
they developed with the Vietnamese. It’s 
well known that American troops refused 
to fight in growing numbers. What’s not 
generally known is the role of direct oppo- 
sition within the military, much of it fos- 
tered by returned vets. 

The work of the WAW so impressed 
the Vietnamese political leadership that 
they issued directives to their command- 
ers and troops in the field not to fire on 
American soldiers who wore parapherna- 
lia of protest or carried their weapons in an 
upside-down position, part of the WAW 
symbol. As the war progressed, there were 
examples of entire American units in the 
field signing up for WAW membership. 
Little could the small minds that had sown 
these men (half of who were under the age 
of 19) in that ancient, fertile and beseiged 
land, realize they would harvest a crop of 
dragon’s teeth in return. 

If you’ve been around the revolution- 
ary block, you’ll find Winter Soldiers to 
be a stroll down memory lane, with glances 
at some facets of that experience long 
forgotten or others never known. 

If you’re coming of age as we enter the 
final years of the twentieth century, you’ll 
be able to see in the men of the WAW 
your own reflection, given similar objec- 
tive circumstances what was done, what 
could be done, and what it will be neces- 
sary to do. 

FE Note: Nick Medvecky was a civil 
rights activist (1961-65) in the South and, 
later, an anti-war coordinator. He covered 
the WAW Winter Soldier Investigation 
for CREEM magazine. He is currently 
serving a federal prison term: #12155- 
039, P.O. Box 8000, Bradford, PA 16701. 


Book Review 


Vietnam: The Dirty 
War Told By the 
Men Who Fought & 
Oppossed It 


‘This highly recommended essay is available 
in the Winter 1990 Fifth Estate for $2 from 
the FE office. 


Two Vietnam vets testify at 1971 anti-war 
hearings in Detroit. 


Winter Soldiers: An Oral History of Vietnam 
Veterans Against the War, Richard 
Stacewicz, Twayne Publishers, 1997, New 
York, 471 pp. 


by Nick Medvecky 


F or April 15th, 1967, the Detroit sec- 
tion of the anti-Vietnam war move- 
ment chartered an entire train. War 
protesters from around the nation converged 
on New York City for a huge march and rally. 

Before the sun set that day, a half mil- 
lion people rallied at Sheep’s Head 
Meadow in South Central Park and 
marched down Fifth Avenue, overflowing 
numerous side streets and filling the United 
Nations plaza. Another 100,000 demon- 
strated in San Francisco. It was an auspi- 
cious display of the power of the antiwar 
movement, demonstrating the mass pro- 
portions it had achieved in just two years 
of organizing. 

Behind the parade leaders that day 
(which included Martin Luther King, Jr., 
signifying the melding of the two great 
movements of the ’60s), marched several 
thousand military veterans, most of them 
from World War II. In front of them was a 
small group of young men carrying a ban- 
ner reading, “Vietnam Veterans Against 
the War.”— WAW. 

While that spring-showered day only 
witnessed about a dozen men of this new 
vets group in attendance, within three years 
more than 50,000 Vietnam veterans would 
join this movement, actively opposing the 
war — over half of them combat experi- 
enced — officers as well as enlisted men. 
April 15th, 1967, was the first time in 
American history that soldiers returned to 
organize against an ongoing war. 

That July, as a non-Vietnam veteran of 
the 101st Airborne Division (U.S. Army, 
1959-61) and chairman of the Detroit 
Committee to End the War in Vietnam, I 
flew to Chicago to meet with one of those 
young vets who had marched with us in 
New York City — Jan Barry Crumb. Along 


with veterans 
from several 
different cities, 
we made plans 
for the devel- 
opment of 
such groups, 
both Vietnam 
vets and oth- 
ers, across 
the nation. 

The 
most sig- 
nificant by 
far was to 
be the 
WAW. 
Back in 
Detroit we 
had already founded the Vet- 
erans Against the War, a group which 
included veterans from all branches of the 
military since we had few Vietnam vets at 
that time. 

Winter Soldiers, a book by historian 
Richard Stacewicz, is the oral history of 
the WAW — men who changed the char- 
acter of the anti-war movement, a move- 
ment whose activists had come mostly 
from the universities. 

The most significant work accom- 
plished by the WAW was in reaching 
back to the soldiers themselves. By June 
1971, Detroit News columnist and mili- 
tary historian, retired colonel Robert Heinl, 
would make the extraordinary admission 
that the military in Vietnam was nearing a 
state of complete collapse.* What that 
former officer would not admit was the 
critical role of opposition by soldiers from 
that war, and even from within the armed 
forces itself. 

Jan Barry Crumb (who served in Viet- 
nam and then resigned from West Point 
rather than continue to be a part of the 
war) asks, “Who’s going to tell the history 
of the Vietnam war?” Winter Soldiers helps 
answer that question. With its easy-to- 
read, oral-history format, the book docu- 
ments the struggles of these men, from 
their pre-induction days, to their experi- 
ences in Vietnam, to their contributions to 
stopping the war and beyond. 

In addition to being the point-men of 
the anti-war movement and the profound 
influence they had on its mass base and 
the general public, examples of the ac- 
complishments of the WAW include: 
counseling those with post-Vietnam syn- 
drome, a forerunner of the now-recog- 
nized Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder 
(PTSD); the creation of such organiza- 
tions as Twice Born Men and Swords to 
Plowshares; and their work in exposing 
Agent Orange. 

Vietnam Veterans Against the War held 
their own demonstrations as well. Their 
actions were often outrageous, always 


surprising, sometimes funny and some- 
times not-so-funny. In public and dra- 
matic protests, and ingenious forms of 
guerilla theatre, they “invaded” commu- 
nities giving citizens a mock taste of the 
war they had fought in Vietnam. They 
threw their medals back at those who sent 
them to Vietnam when a fence was erected 
physically barring them from the halls of 
Congress; they printed and distributed a 
variety of underground newspapers and 
films; established coffee houses outside 
of military bases and counseled all com- 
ers against the draft. 

Winter Soldiers also documents world 
events revolving around and shaping these 
men, the “sea” in which they swam. 

While the Vietnamese were forced to 
fight an anti-colonial war for indepen- 
dence against the United States, their erst- 
while ally of World War II, they had to 
wait another 30 years (1945-75) and suf- 
fer three million dead before achieving 
self-determination. 

The only way the war could be waged 
was to strip young recruits of their critical 
processes through brutal indoctrination, 
inculcate them with racial hatred, teach 
them to obey authority without question, 
and demonize the Vietnamese. But 2,000 
years of struggle by the Vietnamese, the 
unexpected backlash of radicalization and 
opposition to the war by the American 
public (a 1 967 Gallup poll showed 52% of 
Americans opposed the war) and these 
soldiers brought the U.S. political leader- 
ship instead to defeat. 

In the beginning of their organizing 
efforts, WAW testimony about the brutal 
norm of that criminal war was mostly met 
with deaf ears. While the American public 
was used to taking their doses of sin in 
religious dollops, they were not prepared 
to hear the brutality of the war committed 
by their sons that were sent there. 

When the story of My Lai massacre 
broke in 1969 (belatedly reported by the 
corporate press), documenting graphically 
the slaughter of hundreds of Vietnamese 
women, young children and even infants 
(the only “enemy” available), it lay bare 
the American psyche to the reality of that 


Joe Urgo: I was not carrying ammu- 
nition any more. I decided: If the shit gets :T~v 
hot again. I'm running: I'm not going to - v : 

kill. By the end of the year.the attitude 
among the troops was so rebellious that jgk,. 
nobody was wearing their helmets any- = 
more. We weren't saluting the officers. 

The base police were given orders to 
write up all the guys coming off the night 
shift if they did not have their helmets on 
and if they didn't salute the officers. Now 


1970 WAW March. — FE file p 


PAGE 22 


FIFTH ESTATE SUMMER 1998 




O n 28th September last, a group of un- 
known people approached a field in 
County Carlow, Ireland, with malicious in- 
tent. They proceeded to tear apart an acre of 
sugar beets, then disappeared back into the 
night from which they came. 

The field was the property of Teagasc, 
a semi-state agricultural research organi- 
zation. The catchily-branded Roundup 
Ready Sugar Beet that was destroyed had 
grown from seed provided by the U.S. 
multinational, Monsanto. (See p.2) The 
sabotage was claimed by the Gaelic Earth 
Liberation Front. 

The sabotage recalls images from the 
past of other agrarian groups that moved 
at night to inflict peasant j ustice with names 
like the White Boys or the Ribbon Men. 

This action was another front in a glo- 
bal struggle over the control of food sup- 
ply currently being waged. It is seen in the 
continual destruction of subsistence pro- 
duction, and the application of high-tech- 
nology to and commodification of basic 
foodstuffs. 

It is also part of a struggle against the 
introduction of biotechnology, what capi- 
tal expects to replace current chemical 
process technology. A November 1995 
article in the Economic and Political 
Weekly stated, “According to the projec- 
tions of several reputed institutions, bio- 
technology is slated to account for al- 
most 60 to 70 percent of the global 
economy for the next two to three de- 
cades. . .biotechnology covers a span of 
economic sectors which is unprecedented. 
" Tt will play i role in fields as diverse as 
mining, feedstock chemicals, energy, phar- 
maceuticals and of course food.” 

And, surprise, surprise: this biotech- 
nology sector will be almost entirely in 
the hands of the world’s ten to twelve 
largest multinational corporations. 

The Australian pamphlet Colonizing 
the Seed: Genetic Engineering and 
Techno-Industrial Agriculture concisely 
puts forward reasons for concern over the 
introduction of genetically engineered 
seeds. Author Gyorgy Scrinis argues, “that 


genetic engineering represents a continu- 
ation, indeed an intensification, of the 
techno-industrial approach to agricultural 
production, and the social inequalities, 
concentrations of power/wealth, and eco- 
logical problems it>has produced.” 

While this account is good on the pro- 
cess of commodification involved in this 
development, it lacks details of who is 
monopolizing the seed business. For the 
carve-up of the global seeds business that 
is the background against which geneti- 
cally engineered seeds are being intro- 
duced, Scrinis’ work should be supple- 
mented by P.R. Mooney’s classic Seeds of 
the Earth: A Private or Public Resource? 
(Ottawa: Inter Pares) Although much of 
Mooney’s information is now dated, its 
concentration on corporate maneuverings 
is bang on target. 

On a more anecdotal and less theoreti- 
cal basis, Robin Mather’s Garden of Un- 
earthly Delights: Bioengineering and the 
Future of Food (Dutton) looks at changes 
in U.S. food production and consumption 
and how they have moved from raw real- 
ity to a situation where everything is pro- 
cessed. Mather, a striking Detroit Free 
Press food writer (FE note: recently called 
back to work at the scab gulag), examines 
dairy, tomato and chicken production, and 
compares corporate methods of produc- 
tion with alternative, humane methods. 
Her book, which has a useful index and 
list of resources, ends by arguing for a new 
approach to food. Back to the garden and 
the kitchen, folks: you know it makes 
sense. — Tomas MacSheoin 

Note: The Scrinis title is available from 
Anti-Genetic Engineering Collective, 3 1 2 
Smith St. Collingwood, 3066, Melbourne, 
Australia. Tomas MacSheoin’s Poisoning 
Asia: The Relocation of Toxic Technolo- 
gies from North to South, is forthcoming 
from The Other India Press, (Mapusa 403 
507 Goa, India). 


In TERRORgation: The CIA’s Secret 
Manual on Coercive Questioning, edited 
by Jon Elliston and Charles Overbeck, 
illustrated, Parascope, 1430 Willamette, 
#329, Eugene OR 97401, 56pp., $5.95 or 
www.parascope.com 

O ne anniversary you may have missed 
in 1997 was the 50-year anniversary of 
the birth of the Central Intelligence Agency, 
the secret government organization princi- 
pally devoted to waging covert state terror- 
ism. To put the spotlight on this repressive 
legacy, Parascope, a small publisher, has re- 
leased the previously classified 1963 
KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation. 
(KUBARK is the CIA’s code name). Thanks 
is due to Elliston and Overbeck for helping 
make available this chilling manual used in 
the agency’s long-hidden crimes. 

Although certain sentences remained 
blacked out in the name of CIA 
(in)security, there’s plenty of terrifying 
technical instruction stated clearly in dead- 
pan prose for anyone wondering about the 
mentality within this darkest of agencies. 
The manual lists, in chillingly detached 
bureacratic language how to extract de- 


sired information through 
the use of sensory depriva- 
tion, pain, electric shock, 
hypnosis and drugs. 

It would be a mistake to 
dismiss this publication as 
just a tragic Vietnam foot- 
note or an institutionalized 
strokebook for curious sa- 
dists. 

In a section titled, “Co- 
ercive Counterintelligence 
Interrogation of Resistant 
Sources” (uncooperative 
types), the description of 
the methodical use of force 
in getting difficult infor- 
mation is quite disturbing. 

There are also lengthier 
sections detailing consid- 
erable information on non- 
coercive methods of inter- 
rogation now favored by 
modern law enforcement agencies 
throughout the world. 

Although, the manual was designed pri- 
marily for search and destroy missions 
during foreign wars, if one simply re- 
places the prisoner-of-war terminology of 
“interrogatee” with “detainee” or “sus- 
pect,” then the non-physical techniques 
listed are easily transferable to more com- 
mon run-ins with local law enforcement. 

The following instruction from the 
manual could be used at the neighborhood 
precinct no less than half a world away: 
“The non-coercive interrogation is not 
conducted without pressure On the con- 
trary, the goal is to generate maximum 
pressure, or at least as much as is needed 
to induce compliance. The difference is 
that the pressure is generated inside the 
interrogatee. His resistance is sapped, his 
urge to yield is fortified, until in the end he 
defeats himself.” 

Although it’s well known that interro- 
gation is part of the job description for 
police, seldom has its brutality been pre- 
sented so frankly for public scrutiny. Di- 
gest this information for those dreaded 
encounters you hope you’ll never have. 
ParaScope’ s CIA Interrogation manual is 
the next best thing to having a lawyer 
present (or a get-out-of-jail free pass). 

— Bill Blank 


book reviews 


Unabomber 

continued from page 2 

One didn’t have to be a thoroughly 
conditioned megamachine clone to see 
Kaczynski’s gratuitous grudge bombings 
as proof that he was not entirely sane. But 
as Finnegan shrewdly comments, the self- 
evident madness of sending bombs through 
the mail, or leaving them in public places, 
or planting them on airplanes (in the latter 
case, apparently, because their noise out- 
raged him) cannot be used as evidence of 
insanity since those acts are the crimes 
themselves. Of course, we must also al- 
ways remind ourselves, “sane” compared 
to whom? Designers of “smart bombs,” or 
military scientists who willfully spread 
nuclear radiation in secret weapons tests, 
or researchers trying to map the genetic 
code to harness it for science, or industry 
flacks paid to disprove global warming? 
Articles on the trial in The New York 
Times were frequently positioned on the 
page with a dark irony. For example, be- 
low the continuation of its December 9, 
1997 article on the trial was a small item 
reporting that increased ultraviolet rays 


caused by atmospheric ozone loss may be 
causing the worldwide disappearance of 
amphibians; and next to a continuation of 
an article on the sanity controversy in the 
J anuary 8 issue was a photo story on a fatal 
explosion and fire at an explosives factory. 

If we can now say with assurance that 
Kaczynski was the Unabomber, his career 
as an anti-tech guerrilla is even more ques- 
tionable than it seemed before his identity 
was known. To give one example: some 
time after his attempt to get into a grad 
program was humiliatingly rebuffed by an 
arrogant professor at the Chicago Circle 
campus of the University of Illinois, he 
planted his first bomb there. Kaczynski 
then recklessly bombed universities for a 
while, with a swipe at an airliner and at 
Boeing Corporation, but he managed to 
injure mostly secretaries and students. His 
first fatality killed a computer retail store 
owner (a powerful director of the 
megatechnic pyramid, to be sure). 

Kaczynski’s handful of supporters and 
his defense committee (who spent his ini- 
tial incarceration arguing that it was physi- 
cally impossible for him to carry out the 
bombings), will now surely justify his 


acts by declaring all of us guilty, from 
imperial administrators down to the fel- 
low at the hot dog stand. Others will natu- 
rally be troubled by poor Kaczynski’s ad- 
mitted lifelong lack of affect, his rage and 
resentment, and his notable ability to 
conflate and confuse his undeniable per- 
sonal calamities with a far larger and more 
serious social crisis. This seems indeed to 
be how the warped contemporary version 
of the idea that the “personal is political” 
now works — a noxious failure of both 
reasoning and feeling now plaguing an 
ostensibly radical milieu that under other 
circumstances might have become truly, 
and in a life-affirming way, revolution- 
ary. Contrary to the ingenuous (if callous) 
notion that the Unabomber has initiated 
crucial and heretofore nonexistent discus- 
sions about the nature of mass technics, 
“FC” only managed to contribute to such 
a discussion’s marginalization and 
trivialization by the very media that made 
the hooded Unabomber figure a kind of 
darkly comic culture anti-hero. 

At some point recently I noticed that 
the shorthand of my notes on Theodore 
Kaczynski referred to him simply as “K,” 


thus bringing Kafka’s protagonist in The 
Trial to mind along with the dystopian 
novels of Orwell and Huxley. 

This sad and angry man’s motives re- 
main obscure, and one shudders to think 
what kind of theories he will offer to his 
coterie, but his danse macabre with the 
U.S. injustice system, another travesty in 
a long and sordid history, has earned him 
our human sympathy as a victim of the 
technobureaucratic machinery toward 
which he focussed some legitimate in- 
sight and rage. Nevertheless, long before 
Mr. K’s misguided terror campaign, the 
dire threat posed to humanity and global 
life-webs by industrial capitalism was 
becoming clear to growing numbers of 
people. 

It remains the historic obligation of this 
and coming generations to reorient human 
societies toward life. But doing so re- 
quires minimally that we recognize the 
difference between mere symptoms of cri- 
sis and those subjective and objective con- 
ditions that might lead to authentic trans- 
formation. The Unabomber’ s campaign 
and his cheerleaders are sad indications of 
how much remains to be done. 


SUMMER 1998 FIFTH ESTATE 


PAGE 23 




News & 
Reviews 


Reviews by Allan Antliff unless noted 

T Tncontrollables vs the Grotesque Frame- 
U Up Against Anarchists in Italy: Dossier, 
1997 documents the Italian government’s ef- 
forts to target Italy’s anarchist movement 
using the confession of an activist’s former 
lover. The government is using her testimony 
to pin numerous unsolved kidnappings, bank 
robberies, and direct actions (attacks on en- 
ergy pylons, etc.) on over 50 anarchists. 

Authorities have raided numerous 
homes, anarchist centers, bookstores and 
publications in their quest for evidence. A 
trial which began last summer focused on 
four anarchists who were caught in 1994 
robbing a bank — Alfredo Bonanno, Jean 
Weir, Carlo Tesseri, and Christos 
Stratigopulos. 

Weir and others publish Elephant Edi- 
tions books and the Bratach Dubh pam- 
phlet series (available in English through 
AK distribution) which offer important 
theoretical perspectives on anarchist strat- 
egies of resistance (affinity groups, 
illegalism, sabotage) as well as penetrat- 
ing analyses of the evolution of capitalism 
and new possibilities for revolution open- 
ing up. For a copy, write B.M. Ignition, 
London. WC IN 3XX, England. 


'Dabble Review: Encouraging a Healthy 
Disrespect for Authority, Summer 1997, 
(PO Box 4710. Arlington, VA 22204; $4) is 
a new anarchist quarterly edited by Tom 
Wheeler. 

Its purpose is to “call into question 
every form of corporate domination in our 
daily lives” — surely a tall order given the 
pervasive influence of totalitarian institu- 
tions. This issue covers fast-food restau- 
rant behavior modification, the political 
“feudalism” of American public life at the 
hands of corporations, the co-optation of 
the internet as a business tool, and an 
exchange between two punk bands, one of 
which (“Padded Cell”™) is sliding into 
corporate status at a rapid clip. 

W ar Crime #5 (1997). PO Box 2741 Tuc- 
son, AZ 85702 USA; $2; irregular. 
This is an odd mix. Among other things 
we get a Mumia update, a circular from 
the Polish Anarchist Black Cross, two 
band interviews, a “How to Make Tofu” 
feature, and obscure zine reviews. The 
journal lacks focus, and it shows. 

(Note by Peter Werbe on War Crime 
#7: This issue contains the focus Allan 
felt #5 lacked. It features an interview 
with a member of the Black Autonomy 
collective, a history of the Sea Shepherd 
Conservation Society, news of Daishowa’s 
war on the Lubicon people, vegan recipes, 
and more to make a nicely rounded issue.) 
Continued on page 25 


Fifth Estate Books 


S£jwf»»si?iess? 

chumbawamba 




NOAM, CHOMSKY 

/*- T A | R i l.L.S 


Chumbawamba: 

Back Before They Was Fab 

CHUMBAWAMBA / NOAM CHOMSKY 
“For A Free Humanity: For Anarchy 5 ’ 

A double CD featuring the now-famous pop band from Leeds (see P.1) on 
disc 1. “Showbusiness” was recorded live in 1994 and contains their best 
pre-”Tubthumping” anarchist material. Previously available only as a 
limited edition expensive import. Disk 2 is a Chomsky lecture— “Capital 
Rules” — a portrait of a two-tier society with islands of wealth in a sea of 
poverty. A 24-page booklet is included with extensive interviews with 
Chomsky and the band. 

AK Press Double CD & Booklet $18 


New Titles 

TROTSKYISM & MAOISM: THEORY 
& PRACTICE IN FRANCE & THE U.S. 
by A. Belden Fields 

A comprehensive analysis of the aims, pro- 
grams, platforms and day-to-day 
(sur)realities of the authoritarian Trotskyist 
and Maoist groups plaguing the planet. 

Autonomedia 363pp. $10.00 

HOPPING FREIGHT TRAINS IN 
AMERICA 
by Duffy Littlejohn 

Presents a lively and exhaustive account of 
the author’ s travels all over the U.S. coupled 
with an incredible wealth of information 
concerning not only the techniques, dangers 
and thrills of riding but also railroad lore, 
history and North American hobohemia. 
Sand River 352pp. $14.00 

. 

BASIC BAKUNIN 
by Anarchist Communist Federation 
An overview and examination of some of 
Bakunin’s central theories & ideas. A good, 
clear, concise introduction to Mikhail Baku- 
nin and his vision of anarchy. 

Paterson @ Collective 16p. $1.00 

FIRST & LAST EMPERORS: 

THE ABSOLUTE STATE & THE 
BODY OF THE DESPOT, 
by Kenneth Dean & Brian Massumi 
Exploratory philosophic prose detailing the 
strange and suggestive parallels between the 
ancient despotic empires of China with the 
Reagan/Bush empire of the 1980s. 
Autonomedia 208pp. $6.00 


ABC OF ANARCHISM 
by Alexander Berkman 

An introduction to classic anarchist commu- 
nism written in a clear, eloquent, simple style 
following Berkman and Emma Goldman’s 
disillusionment in the Bolshevik counter- 
revolution. 

Freedom Press 86pp $4 

THIS WORLD WE MUST LEAVE & 
OTHER ESSAYS 
by Jacques Camatte 

Camatte straightforwardly calls leftist po- 


litical organizations and labor unions “rack- 
ets.” He depicts a voracious Capital endowed 
with anthropomorphic needs requiring the do- 
mestication of humans. The stand-off between 
Capital vs. The Earth gives a context for evalu- 
ating ecological devastation. Camatte helped 
us to definitively leave the Progress band- 
wagon. 

Autonomedia 256pp $9 

LIVING MY LIFE Vol I & II 
by Emma Goldman 

The turbulent autobiography of a woman at the 
center of the century’s major events. Although 
her life intersected with the famous figures of 
the era, it is the day-to-day struggles for anar- 
chy which make this account come alive. This 
is the original two-volume edition first pub- 
lished in 1931. 

Dover 993pp (2 volumes) $18 

HAVING LITTLE, BEING MUCH: A 
CHRONICLE OF FREDY PERLMAN’S 
FIFTY YEARS 
by Lorraine Perlman 

A remembrance of a friend, and the times and 
the Detroit community in which he lived. 
“Lorraine’s direct and unadorned style lets 
Fredy’s life speak for itself; one cannot help 
but see it as exemplary.” — FE Review 
Black &Red 155pp $5 


ECO-DEFENSE: A FIELD GUIDE TO 
MONKEYWRENCHING 
edited by 

Dave Foreman and Bill Haywood 

This new, revised and enlarged third edition 
contains everything the wilderness defender 
needs to know about how to disable, dismantle, 
and destroy the machinery, buildings and ve- 
hicles, etc. of those who are raping the earth 
for profit. Sabotage techniques are richly de- 
tailed with diagrams, first hand accounts and 
“field notes.” 

Ned Ludd Books 311pp $20 

THE LAST DAYS OF CHRIST THE 
VAMPIRE 
by J.G. Eccarius 

One of the most blasphemous books we have 
seen since the classics of sacrilege. The book 
jacket states; “His power grew over the ages. 
Enslaving minds and bodies through both reli- 
gious hierarchies and direct telepathic control, 


Also New from 
CHUMBAWAMBA 

i-Portraits of Anarchists 

by Casey Orr 

A photographic collection of anarchists 
accompaied by a new 6-track 
Chumbawamba CD of previously 
unreteased material unvailable elsewhere. 

One Liriie indian/AK Press CD & Book $25 


Jesus Christ the Vampire promises people 
eternal life for the price of their minds.” 
8,0000 copies sold! 

11 1 Publishing 180pp $10 

FREE WOMEN OF SPAIN: 

Anarchism and the Struggle for the 
Emancipation of Women 
by Martha Ackelsberg 
Ackelsberg traces the efforts during the Span- 
ish Revolution by Mujeres Fibres, to create 
an independent organization of working class 
women that would empower them to take 
their place in the revolution and in the new 
society. She argues that their analysis of 
domination and subordination, and the cen- 
trality of notions of community, are equally 
important for contemporary feminists. 
Indiana Univ. Press 256pp $15 

MUTUAL AID: A Factor of Evolution 
by Peter Kropotkin 

An anarchist classic which profoundly influ- 
enced theories of human biology. His thesis 
anticipated modern sociology was “pro- 
pounded as a counterblast to the social con- 
clusions drawn from the Darwinian ‘struggle 
for existence.’” — Alex Comfort. 

Freedom Press 278pp $11 

AUTONOMOUS TECHNOLOGY: 
TECHNICS OUT-OF-CONTROL AS A 
THEME IN POLITICAL THOUGHT 
by Langdon Winner 

Readers interested in technology, politics 
and social change will find this a useful 
guide and a thoughtful inquiry into the rela- 
tionship between technology and society. In 
it. Winner outlines the paradoxes of techno- 
logical development, the image of alien- 
ation and liberation evoked by machines, 
and assesses the historical conditions under- 
lying the exponential growth of technology. 
M.I.T. Press 386pp $11 


Fifth Estate Books is located at 4632 Second Avenue, just south of W. Forest, in Detroit, 
in the same space as the Fifth Estate Newspaper. Hours vary, so please call before coming 
by. 

HOW TO ORDER BY MAIL 

1) List the title of the book, quantity, and the price of each; 2) add 10% for mailing costs — 
not less than $1.24 U.S. or $1.60 foreign (minimum for 4th class book rate postage); 3) 
total; 4) write check or money order to: Fifth Estate; 5) mail to: Fifth Estate, 4632 
Second Ave., Detroit MI 48201 USA. Phone 313/831-6800 for hours and more 
information. 


PAGE 24 


FIFTH ESTATE SUMMER 1998 


OBJECTIVITY & 

LIBERAL SCHOLARSHIP 
by Noam Chomsky 
Introduction by Peter Werbe 
Taken from Chomsky’s 1969 American Power 
and the New Mandarins, this thin volume ex- 
posed his colleagues’ cooperation with the 
imperial slaughter in Southeast Asia. Written 
while the Vietnam war was raging, he demon- 
strates how the same ideology distorts the 
work of scholars who analyzed earlier con- 
flicts. His critique of historians of the Spanish 
Revolution and Civil War includes a stirring 
account of the anarchist participation which is 
either ignored or falsified by liberals and 
stalinists alike. This is the best short history of 
the Spanish anarchists’ triumphs and defeats. 
Black & Red 142pp $6 

TIMBER WARS 
by Judi Bari 

These are some of the essays that played a role 
in radicalizing a generation of ecology activ- 
ists. Essays and interviews on Redwood Sum- 
mer and the bombing which crippled Bari, on 
the split in Earth First!, on life in the timber 
mills, on mainstream environmentalist betray- 
als of the grassroots movement, on “the femi- 
nization of Earth First!,” on monkeywrench- 
ing and the decision to renounce tree-spiking, 
and much more. Proceeds from sale of this 
book go to the Redwood Justice Fund to con- 
tinue Judi’s and Darryl Cherney’s lawsuit 
against the FBI for complicity in the 1990 car 
bombing. 

Common Courage Press 344 pp. $15 

PEOPLE WITHOUT GOVERNMENT 
An Anthropology of Anarchism 
by Harold Barclay 

“Ten thousand years ago everyone was an 
anarchist,” writes Barclay in this engaging 
book. Barclay covers anarchy among hunter- 
gatherers, gardeners, herders, agriculturalists 
and even moderns. He has reservations about 
primal societies (we would probably disagree 
with sonie furtdamentals in his description). 
Yet his “anarcho-cynicalist point of view” — 
that anarchy may never be attained, and thus 
“[t]he battle is forever” — is undogmatic, and 
his citations interesting and appealing. 

Kahn & Averill 162pp. $12.95 

BEYOND BOOKCHIN: 

Preface for a Future Social Ecology 
by David Watson 

Besides providing a thorough critique of Murray 
Bookchin’s narrow version of social ecology„this 
wide-ranging essay explores new paths of think- 
ing about radical ecological politics. “A brilliant, 
carefully argued critique [which] will do much 
to restore social ecology’s promise as a broad, 
liberatory vision.” — John Clark. “Bookchin is the 
Elmer Fudd of North American anarchism, and 
Watson is the Bugs Bunny.” — Hakim Bey. 
Black & Red/Autonomedia 256pp. $8.00 

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL 
ANTHOLOGY 

translated & edited by Ken Knabb 
A compendium of writings by the influential 
Situationist International group. Included are 
texts preceding the group’s formation, 
soundtracks from Guy Debord’s avant-garde 
films, flyers dating from May 1968 and inter- 
nal I.S. exchanges. 

Bureau of Public Secrets 406pp. $15 

MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST 
by Peter Kropotkin 

Kropotkin’s best known work and one of the 
great works of revolutionary literature. In it he 
brings alive the ferment of ideas and move- 
ments in the Europe of the late 19th century. If 
one wishes to know what it was like to be a 
revolutionary when it meant hounding, Sibe- 
ria, imprisonment or death, here is the book. 
Dover Publication 557pp $12 


For a complete list of available 
FE issues, send an SASE, or re- 
quest it with your book order 


NEWS & REVIEWS 

Continued from page 24 

Melancholic Troglodytes No. 1 (397/1996), 
Box MT, 121 Railton Road, Heme (the 
Hunter) Hill, London, SE24, UK is bilingual 
(English/ Arabic), focusing on Iran by com- 
bating the mullahs with ribald humor and the 
pre-industrial paganism of both East and 
West. Unfortunately, the articles aren’t very 
coherent or well-written. Lengthy attention 
to the Kami-Kazi militarization of pre-indus- 
trial Japan or the Zanj slave revolts in medi- 
eval Persia pull up short when the authors 
attempt to draw conclusions relevant for the 
present day. 

Earth First! Action Update, #42 
(Septemberish 1997), Dept. 29, 1 Newton 
Street, Manchester, Ml 1HW, UK, is 
packed with information, contact ad- 
dresses, and news of ongoing campaigns, 
including numerous successful ones. More 
to the point, you can keep abreast of im- 
portant international actions (Shell Oil 
protests, for example) and new, innova- 
tive direct action tactics being employed 
in the UK. 

It also includes an excellent primer on 
the advantages of affinity groups, which 
offer a “non-hierarchical, participatory, 
flexible and friendly” means of organiz- 
ing attuned to anarchist principles. 



“Errico Malatesta” from Designs for Anarchist 
Postage Stamps featuring 16 portraits of 
libertarian activists by Clifford Harper & 
afterword by Colin Ward. From Rebel Press, 
available from Left Bank Books and AK Press. 

Class War, (Summer 1997) 50 p/$2.00; 
PO Box 467, London E83QX UK 

This edition announces itself as the 
final issue and the dissolution of the orga- 
nization of the same name. Whenever I 
encounterproclamations regarding the dis- 
solving of a revolutionary project, I am 
always struck by the paradoxical nature of 
the act: the ideas that gave birth to the 
project necessitate the project itself be 
dissolved! 

The majority of UK’s anarchist Class 
War Federation responded to its apparent 
stagnation, hierarchy, “platform” bicker- 
ing, and little growth by deciding to dis- 
band. They hope this will lead to new 
ideas for collaborative work that can move 
Class War’s politics “beyond the shadow 
of the left.” 

So what are these politics? The Class 
War Federation always put the working- 
class on the front burner of its program, 
but beyond this there was confusion as the 
organization sought to shape this class in 
their own revolutionary image. In effect, 
Class War carved out a ghetto of correct 
“working-class” politics, in part by pillo- 
rying anarchist organizations that made 
no claim to be class-based, such as Earth 
First!, for so-called “lifestyle leftism.” 

Ironically, Class War generated its own 


puritanical brand of “lifestyle” (macho 
“working-class” violence) along with left- 
ism of the worst sort. Fixated on a pseudo- 
Marxist program of working-class sepa- 
ratism, the organization failed to recog- 
nize the full range of anti-capitalist 
struggles underway, and this failure led 
straight to the full-blown sectarianism that 
lies at the root of its problems. 

That said, I still admire Class War for 
what it achieved over its short span of 
existence and lament the organization’s 
demise. But then, I may be speaking too 
soon — apparently the minority faction 
based in London continues to operate and 
put out a paper. 

FE Note: Yes, Allan, they’re baaack! 
The new Class War can be had for a 
donation and a SAE from BM Box 5538, 
London WC1N 3 XX, UK. 

Earth First! Journal (November-De- 
cember, 1997) PO Box 1415, Eugene OR 
97440, $4.00 Can/$3.50 US. 

This issue contains informative exposes 
of the devastating environmental implica- 
tions of the Multilateral Agreement on 
Investment, NASA’s nukes-in-space pro- 
gram, and Asia-Pacific Economic Coop- 
eration plans to accelerate logging in the 
Pacific rim. 

Various developments in the U.S. and 
Canada are also featured, such as the gut- 
ting of the California Environmental Pro- 
tection Act and the duplicity of the social- 
democratic New Democrat government in 
British Columbia (BC), which claims to 
support logging reform while clear cuts 
continue to make up 92 percent of BC 
logging (with 82 percent cutting right up 
to the stream banks). 

There is a report on the first road block- 
ade ever to disrupt logging-as-usual in 
Virginia’s George Washington National 
Forest. Another article chronicles the 74- 
day blockade in Idaho’s Cove/Mallard 
forest, where EF!ers from the Rainbow 
Family of Love and Light carried out a 
complex strategy involving the suspen- 
sion of activists in “co-dependent bipod/ 
tripods” over the logging roads. 

ContraFlow do 56a Infoshop, 56 
Crampton St., London SE17, UK, covers 
actions in the UK, with “roving corre- 
spondents” providing reports on European 
activities. Each issue has an invaluable 
calendar listing upcoming events and ac- 
tions. European news in this issue de- 
scribes the disruption of the June 1997 
EEC summit in Amsterdam, where anar- 
chists made their presence felt. 

There’s also a piece on the defense of 
squats in Berlin, as well as a report from a 
ContraFlow activist who attended an Anti- 
Capitalist Economics gathering in Spain. 
Back in London, the September 25th In- 
ternational Day of Action in solidarity 
with the striking Liverpool dockers was 
kicked off by a “visit” to the home of 
Gordon Waddle, CEO of Liverpool’s 
Mersyside Docks Company. Then on to 
the headquarters of the Drake’s Temp 
agency, which recruits scabs for 
Mersyside. 

Additional UK campaigns are featured, 
including updates on government perse- 
cution of animal rights activists. 

Even though the immediate threat of 
nuclear war has diminished, the struggle 
against the existence of atomic weapons 
and nuclear power continues. Check out 
the stalwart quarterly. The Nuclear Re- 
sister, for information about and support 


for imprisoned anti-nuclear and anti-war 
activists. Each issue contains action re- 
ports, a calendar of upcoming events, pris- 
oner support information, jail writings and 
international resistance news. Subs: $15 
yearly; sample on request. Nuclear Re- 
sister, PO Box 43383, Tucson AZ 85733; 
nukeresister@igc.org. — PW 

Visions of Freedom, $3, PO Box 13, Enmore 
2042, Australia, www.cat.triode.net.au. 

The articles in Visions of Freedom, a 
pamphlet intended to recall the 1995 Vi- 
sions of Freedom Anarchist Conference in 
Sydney, are written with humor, indigna- 
tion and passion without presenting any 
party line. Included are critiques of the 
Australian government's complicity in East 
Timor, the academic establishment, the 
media and supporters of national libera- 
tion. Enough indignation remains, how- 
ever, to direct it at other anarchists, for 
example some queer criticisms of the con- 
ference itself. 

We find a picture of an accordion-play- 
ing faerie nun, Sister Mary Mary Quite 
Contrary, who livened the Pope's recent 
visit to Australia during which a Pope- 
Free Zone was declared. Her colleague, 
Mother Abbyss of the Order of Perpetual 
Indulgence, delivered Sister Mary Mary's 
paper on Gay Rights, AIDS and sex edu- 
cation at the Visions/V ersions conference. 

The companion volume, Versions of 
Freedom, is unfortunately already out of 
print. Too bad; Peter McGregor’s piece 
therein cites and thanks authors of insight- 
ful statements who have helped him to 
grasp anarchist visions while trying to 
make his desires a reality, including 
Vaneigem’s observation, “I live on the 
edge of the universe and I don’t need to 
feel secure.” 

I liked your Visions, friends. Let’s 
dream together. 

— Z. Work 

Social Anarchism is a thoughtful, un- 
dogmatic journal worth reading and sup- 
porting. Issue #24 contains a symposium 
on “the anarchist agenda” with contribu- 
tions from Neala Schleuning, Howard 
Ehrlich and others; an essay by Mike Long 
entitled “Ebonics, Language and Power”; 
John Moore’s commentary on 
“Dianamania”; Sean Burns’s moving trib- 
ute to David Thoreau Wieck; poetry and 
more. 

Also notable are the reviews, including 
Susan Packie’s piece on publishing won- 
der woman Freddie Baer’ s marvelous book 
of collages and collaborations. Ecstatic 
Incisions, and Kingsley Widmer’s review- 
essay on Murray Bookchin’s hideous So- 
cial Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism. 

As someone who was vilified by 
Bookchin’s book, I felt extremely grati- 
fied by Widmer’s level-headed review. 
Widmer is no luddite primitivist, and has 
his differences with people Bookchin 
slams (he even thinks the book has “some 
good points to score”), but he’s judicious 
enough, and rational enough, to see be- 
yond Bookchin’s “self-indulgently irate 
and egotistical polemic.” Widmer clearly 
has differences with the Fifth Estate, but 
he is someone with whom one might be 
able to disagree in a comradely manner. 
His review is a breath of fresh air, perhaps 
the best all-around review of the Bookchin 
book. 

Social Anarchism is good-looking and 
readable. Single issues are $4 and subs are 
$ 14/four issues from 2743 Maryland Ave., 
Baltimore MD 21218. — David Watson 


SUMMER 1998 FIFTH ESTATE 


PAGE 25 



Letters 
to the 
Fifth 
Estate 



Fifth Estate 
Letters Policy 

We welcome letters commenting 
on our articles, stating opinions, or 
giving reports of events in your area. 
We don’t guarantee to print every- 
thing received, but all letters are 
read by our staff and considered for 
publication. 

Typed letters or ones on disk are 
appreciated, but not required. 
Length should not exceed two, 
double-spaced pages. If you are in- 
terested in writing longer responses, 
please contact us. 


On Terrorism 

Sisters & Brothers: 

I received the Fall 1997 issue of the 
Fifth Estate and took note of what Abdul 
Olugbala Shakur had to say and thought 
you might want to critique the enclosure 
entitled, “Terrorism: Some Definitions.” 

Ojore N. Lutalo 

Trenton NJ 

FE Note: The imprisoned Shakur ob- 
jected to the FE’s use of the word “terror- 
ism” to denote armed actions against the 
state. He wrote in part, “It is this type of 
language that gives credence to the 
KKKoverment’s efforts to criminalize the 
legitimacy of our armed struggle in order 
to justify our illegal imprisonment. . .” 

The unsigned leaflet sent to us by the 
also incarcerated Lutalo, quotes approv- 
ingly from Che Guevara and from a state- 
ment by Los Macheteros, a Puerto Rican 
nationalist armed action group. The latter 
says in part, “Terrorism is Terrorism, and 
one must combat White terrorism which is 
reactionary with Red Terrorism, which is 
revolutionary. . .” 

From an ethical standpoint there seems 
to be little legitimacy for violence against 
any unarmed person; strategically, there 
appears to be little gained as well. Just 
more deaths in a bloody century. 

FE Note: The following letter is a re- 


sponse to the objection posed by several 
women in the Trumbull Theatre Collec- 
tive that our Summer 1997 cover, drawn 
by Richard Mock, was sexist or even worse, 
misogynist. Further discussion is welcome. 

Cover Misogynist? 

Dear Fifth Estate: 

Your Mother Russia cover [by Richard 
Mock] (Summer 1997) deserves criticism 
more for being irrelevant to the subject 
matter of the articles, the stark struggle for 
survival of the people in the former Soviet 
Union, and the women in particular, than 
for being sexist per se. I found the history 
of women doing the physical labor with 
men being idle supervisors particularly 
interesting. This content is indicated in no 
way by the cover art. The imagery leaves 
the bad taste of the regurgitation of undi- 
gested Cold War propaganda, so familiar 
from images of Russia in the mainstream 
media. 

The characterization of “Mother Rus- 
sia” as a grotesque and deformed beauty 
queen could have been an accurate char- 
acterization of the present glorification of 
capitalism by the newly rich and gangster 
elite, if the image was not so indebted to 
the genealogy of misogynist and anti-com- 
munist images of Russian women in the 
U.S. media since the Russian Revolution. 
As recently as 1990’s Wendy’s TV ham- 
burger ad, Russian women were depicted 



gauche and garish, 
universally ugly — hairy and overly 
muscled, more suit-ed to pulling plows than 
being the objects of desire we are all sup- 
posed to want to be. It perpetuates the Cold 
War hoop-la denigrating Eastern Bloc 
women athletes as androgenic monsters. The 
stereotypes about the people in the former 
Soviet Union so skillfully challenged in the 
articles is contradicted by the cover, under- 
cutting the potential power of the FE issue’s 
focus. 

How much does the image point at the 
grabbing at money in the newly capitalist 
world and how much does it rely on the 
mockery of the bodies of women hardened 
by physical labor? Is this something which 
should be the object of derision in an 
anarchist publication? How much more 
hypocritical this put-down has become 
with the current image of female beauty in 
the U.S. featuring the faux worker-body 
achieved by compulsive hours in the gym. 


What is presented as unappealing and a 
sexual turn-off in one context becomes 
the epitome of sex appeal in its synthetic 
form. 

Despite the particulars of the iconogra- 
phy within the confines of the U.S.-Soviet 
saga, the cover image, a grotesque one- 
eyed woman grabbing at money, perpetu- 
ates a misogynist archetype. 

Susan Simensky Bietila 
(and worth mentioning in the con- 
text, of Russian- Jewish ancestry, with a 
close relative, the former Miss Brighton 
Beach) 

Milwaukee 

Richard Mock replies: Somewhere a 
unicorn races towards a giant abyss filled 
with delights. Humanity passing through 
a moment in time is really dirty business. 

When I was a kid and drew a lot, I 
thought in a totemistic way. As I made 
drawings, they became magic icons with 
the ability to affect changes in the world 
around me and beyond. All images I drew 
were metaphysical pictures by just com- 
ing into being. I still take advantage of that 
phenomenon whenever the opportunity 
presents itself. 

I think of images as potent experiential, 
emotive and meaning machines. What the 
viewer brings to the image in terms of 
personal consciousness begins the visual 
mind exchange that creates meaning. The 
image fulfills the felt visual needs of the 
composition which is the real mechanics 
that allow for an emotion to occur 
between you and it. 

Your interpretation of the cover 
image as grotesque and deformed is 
not the cover image. It’s your inter- 
pretation of it through the mind fil- 
ters you carry around. We all carry 
them. 

An image goes out multi-directional 
and multi-dimensional with layers of 
potential experiencing to the minds who 
view it. Your state of being affects the 
content you perceive. 

My linocuts complete themselves in 
terms of design and beauty. Here are three 
stories: 

1 . A new editor at The New York Times 
used to check out my Op-Ed page illustra- 
tions with his secretary to see if they could 
find in the art I submitted any hidden 
sexual meanings before they okayed them 
for publication. Oh, yeah, he also thought 
modern art was a shame and Matisse 
couldn’t draw. 

2. I started doing special feature and 
editorial drawings for the New York Daily 
News. I did an illustration for a piece that 
in part described the gunning down of a 
number of city police — sort of psycho- 
drama narrative. I did a linocut of a human 
skull with guns coming out of its eyes, 
nose, mouth, etc. That was the last illus- 
tration I did for the Daily News. An asso- 
ciate editor told me that the president of 
the NRA called the paper and while not 
objecting to the article, he felt the illustra- 


Don’t Lose The Fifth Estate 

If you move without notifying us 
directly you will miss your next 
issue. Even if you file an address 
change at the Post Office, they 
will not forward Periodicals 
mail. Please write before moving 
and include your old address and 
zip code. 


tion put guns in a bad light. That linocut 
print is now in the collection of the Mu- 
seum of Modem Art. 

3. I did a lino art piece for The Times 
illustrating an article by an Air Force colo- 
nel who worked at the Pentagon describ- 
ing how war games were conducted. The 
officer liked the drawing and a print of it 
is hanging in the Pentagon. It is very 
popular, I am told. The following year, at 
a Veterans parade in New York City, a 
group of Vietnam Veterans Against the 
War marched with a banner announcing 
their name and using a blow-up of the 
same linocut image I did for The Times 
Op-Ed piece. Both groups saw the image 
as emblematic of their point of view and 
conveying completely opposite content. 

I think part of the esthetic of the politi- 
cal cartoon is the ability to create a diver- 
sity of meanings that can relate to the 
vastness of our collective awareness. 

As the Syrian cartoonist Ali Fazat said, 
“I leave it to the readers to decide what 
they see.” 

Sunfrog Kissing 

5th Estate: 

Either Sunfrog has been out in the sun 
too long or kissing those frogs that get you 
high. To lump television, war, drugs, 
money and work with 12-step programs is 
ill-informed, irresponsible and jejune. (See 
“The Culture is a Cult,” FE, Summer 
1997.) 

What are you, Sunfrog, the untreated 
adult child of an anarchist? Cults have 
leaders. Twelve-step groups don’t. They 
are probably the closest thing to anarchy 
since it died in Madrid. 

White Boy 

Santa Monica, Calif. 

Save The Humans 

Ladies and Gentlemen: 

Although your very fine magazine is 
many things, it seems less about anar- 
chism then it is about ecological concerns. 
While we love our dogs and all nature, we 
remain unreconstructed anthropocentrists. 
Our bumper sticker is: “Save the Humans”. 

We place equality among men as our 
highest value. One must focus and priori- 
tize as one arranges one’s personal agenda. 
Our sense of clarity requires us to place 
the redistribution of income, wealth and 
power among human beings as a higher 
priority then any and all ecological mat- 
ters. 

There is no scarcity on the planet that a 
modest redistribution of income wouldn’t 
solve. A lady on Radio Netherlands sug- 
gests a tiny tax of one-tenth or one-hun- 
dredth of one percent of all daily oil and/ 
or currency transactions to house, feed 
and educate all men and women on the 
planet so they live as well as any bour- 
geois burgher in Nieuwe Amsterdam (New 
York City) or Oude Amsterdam. 

For a century or more, scarcity has 
been a myth; yet many modern ecologists 
continue to rely on the myth of scarcity to 
scare. Those in power seek to distract us 
by scaring us with a myth of no meaning. 
Distracting obscurantism is flack in any 
man’s propaganda model. When compared 
to the genocide against men in all lands, 
the ecological concerns are those of the 
effete dilettante rather then the core con- 
cern of anarchists — equality and liberty 
through the elimination of hierarchical 
power in society. 


PAGE 26 


FIFTH ESTATE SUMMER 1998 



The Fifth Estate’s digression into ecol- 
ogy reflects the two-decade fashion of 
ecology as portrayed on the cultural screen 
(Zeitgeist). We believe, as did Herbert 
Marcuse, that all culture is propaganda. 

To our minds, the Fifth Estate contin- 
ues to inadvertently or intentionally pro- 
mote the myth of scarcity in the midst of 
abundant and sufficient wealth. 

Grace and Michael Hogan 

Amsterdam, The Netherlands 

The Complexity, 

The Density 

Dear Editor(s): 

I sympathize with the views expressed 
by a wide range of writers in the copies of 
Fifth Estate I sampled. I’m not sure about 
the complexity, the density of the lan- 
guage typically used, though. 

If you want to get the “ordinary people” 
on your side — a laudable enough aim — 
then they must be able to understand what 
you are saying. 

Many of your articles are couched in 
“sociology-speak,” as it were, practically 
inaccessible to the generality of readers. I 
admire writers such as Wendell Berry, 
Jerry Mander and Neil Postman because 
of their Orwellian abilities to convey dif- 
ficult concepts in simple language (often 
beautifully simple language). 

Peter Quince 

Faversham, Kent, UK 

Piecards Unite 

Fellow Workers: 

Your rather odd article on the AFL- 
CIO’s memorial march for the Detroit 
newspaper strike was recently called to 
my attention. I suppose I should be flat- 
tered that you felt it necessary to work my 
name (even if mis-spelled) into a story to 
which I have only the most tenuous con- 
nection. But I am rather saddened by the 
fact that as you return your attention to the 
struggles of working people you evidently 
find it necessary to view the world through 
the blinkered eyes of the AFL-CIO 
piecards. 

The Industrial Worker estimate that 
25,000 people marched was based upon 
personal observation and discussions with 
several IWW members who saw the march 
from different vantage points, and is, if 
anything, rather generous. Labor Notes, 
for example, reported that only “thou- 
sands” marched. 

No purpose is served by deceiving our- 
selves about the weakness of our move- 
ment or exaggerating our strength. Rather, 
we must see the world as it is if we are to 
have any hope of realizing our dreams of 
what it might be. 

Jon Bekken, Editor 

Industrial Worker 

Cambridge, Mass. 

FE replies: Bekken’ s ability to count 
marchers is questionable if he can’t accu- 
rately read an article about the event. Our 
report said the official labor movement 
was incapable of leading struggles even 
within capital and called for independent 
action if workers had any chance to win 
strikes. The story ran with a large photo of 
marchers holding an IWW banner. 

For those unfamiliar with Bekken ’s 
arcane 1920s labor lexicon, a piecard is a 
labor bureaucrat. 


The Revenge of Albion: 

Of Neoists and Green Anarchists 

Readers Respond To David Watson’s “Swamp Fever, 
Primitivism &The Ideological Vortex” 



Worth The Effort 

Dear Fifth Estate: 

As someone drawn into the dispute 
between Green Anarchist (GA) and the 
so-called “Neoist Alliance” because of 
my long-standing support for GA against 
state repression, I would like to make the 
following comments concerning your ar- 
ticle. 

Overall I thought it was excellent and 
thoughtful, and found it very much worth 
the effort and since the imprisonment of 
three people associated with GA in No- 
vember, there has been a heartening ground 
swell of support. Watson is right to posit 
the possibility of a connection between 
the state attack on GA and that by the 
Neoists. As the Oxbridge/public school- 
boy Fabian Tompsett stated in a pamphlet 
written under his pseudonym Luther 
Blissett, “I do hope that this pamphlet has 
helped to undermine any lingering sympa- 
thy for GA, who are trying to muster sup- 
port during their current court case.” [Mi- 
litias: Rooted in White Supremacy, 1997] 

To me, this is a key point, explaining 
why it was that Home/Tompsett should 
have apparently out of the blue decided to 
launch the campaign of lies and 
disinformation against GA, with whom 
they have never had any ideological affin- 
ity or personal connections. 

This follows their previous attacks on 
another anarchist group Class War, just as 
the state campaign against them was 


hotting up — and that campaign 
too included lying accusations 
in the bourgeois media that 
Class War were “fascist.” Plus 
ga change, la meme chose! In- 
deed, given that neither Home 
nor Tompsett claim to be anar- 
chists, and as you rightly point 
out, they frequently denounce 
anti-fascism, any genuine anti- 
fascist motivation is lacking on 
their part. 

Speaking of a trilogy of his 
novels. Home recently stated he 
is “interested in the relationship 
between anarchism and fascism 
as ideologies. There’s a struc- 
tural similarity in the way the 
two ideologies function and in 
particular the fetishization of 
the role of the state in politics 
and a failure to deal radically 
with economics — as you go 
through the three books, your 
ability to distinguish between 
the two ideologies becomes 
more difficult” [Gay Times, 
August 1997]. 

Apart from the political illit- 
eracy and insult to anarchists 
who gave their lives fighting 
fascism, if Home regards the 
two as virtually indistinguish- 
able, then he is not in much of a 
position to criticize anarchists 
for “fascist” sympathies. 
Shortly after he published the 
Green Apocalypse twaddle, 
Tompsett admitted to me and a 
GA member that he didn’t even 
know what fascism was, that 
being a matter for “sociologists” — some- 
thing which hadn’ t stopped him too smear- 
ing GA as “fascist.” And so on. 

Another feature of Home’s “discourse” 
is homophobia, notwithstanding the two- 
page plug for him in Gay Times quoted 
above. I am thinking here of the (bogus) 
short story competition launched by him/ 
Tompsett in 1996, supposedly organized 
by me, in which beneath a Fictitious and 
evidently exemplary account of gay sex 
involving me and another anti-fascist 
called for entries to be “as lewd and ma- 
levolent as possible” — illustrating that is 
how Home/Tompsett perceive gay sex. 

Sure enough, the “winning entry” by 
Home referred to gay people as “turd- 
burglars,” “shit-stabbers,” and “Shit- 
Tifters.” While anti-fascist critics of Home 
have sought to keep things on a political 
level, Home/Tompsett have rarely ven- 
tured out of the sewer of personal abuse — 
a device to conceal the poverty of their 
arguments that I am glad to see hasn’t 
fooled Watson. 

Watson is also right to zero in on the 
Neoists’ “barren unexamined defense of 
industrialism,” and his comments that GA 
should seek to explain the theory their 
practice is based on is correct, although 
Steve Booth (were he not otherwise de- 
tained in prison, as he is) would no doubt 
argue he has already done this in his two 
publications Politics & the Ethical Void 
and Love is Not Enough (both available 
from GA). 


As an ally of GA, but not an anarchist 
myself, I would also observe that your 
comments on the occasional incautious 
and counter-productive use of language 
by GA is a point well-made, and I hope 
they take this comradely criticism to heart. 
Any connection of Home/Tompsett to any 
kind of left politics is tenuous and artifi- 
cial — whereas the sycophantic adoration 
by Home of the undeniably fascist ex- 
National Front member Tony Wakeford is 
beyond any doubt. The output of Home/ 
Tompsett is hardly, as Watson correctly 
deduces, “satire,” it is disinformational 
sewage that consciously seeks to serve the 
state’s purposes. 

There is a need to improve the level of 
genuine political debate in the radical mi- 
lieu, and it is to be hoped that the various 
points made by Watson will be addressed 
by all who call themselves “primitivist.” 
Or indeed those who don’t — the failure of 
other anarchists to engage constructively 
with GA’s ideas is a great pity. But debate 
of a serious nature about how to advance 
progressive politics isn’t something the 
“Neoists” are interested in or even ca- 
pable of — their talents are far more venal, 
a blend of the techniques of Goebbels with 
the veracity of Stalin. 

Larry O’Hara 

Notes from the Borderland 

BM Box 4769 

London WC1N3XX UK 

FE Note: The Winter 1997-98 issue of 
Notes from the Borderland is available 
from the above address for £2.50. 

Futile Practice 

Dear Fifth Estate: 

It was with great effort that I waded 
through David Watson’s “Swamp Fever. . 
.’’(FEFall 1997); I was perpetually bogged 
down in his convoluted style. Still, I must 
congratulate Watson on drawing his line 
of anathema with little of the 
Bookchinesque mean-spiritedness I’d ex- 
pected after certain tidbits in the Summer 
issue (though Watson should get over his 
grudge against John Zerzan) and must 
thank him for making it clear that when 
Fifth Estate wrote critically about the dia- 
lectic of civilization and empire this was 
not intended as a theoretical tool for creat- 
ing an insurgent praxis aimed at the de- 
struction of civilization. 

It was apparently intended as some sort 
of metaphor to inform a futile practice of 
“new” left style community organizing 
married to radical environmentalism. 

It is interesting to note that it usually 
seems to be the humble, tolerant, patient 
radicals who end up excommunicating the 
extremists — but then that simply follows 
in the footsteps of Christian history — the 
religion whose servile values Watson 
wants us extremists to practice. 

For the destruction of civilization and 
the exploration of new ways of living, 

Wolfi Lanstreicher 

New Orleans 

Not Humbled 

Dear FE: 

It wasn’t “humbling” [to us that] you 
read the documents we sent you — the 
Neoist attacks on Green Anarchist are 
important because of the “invisible dicta- 
torship” they’ve extended through UK’s 
Type 3 milieu since the 1980s and because 
of their State links — but close the debate. 


SUMMER 1998 FIFTH ESTATE 


PAGE 27 



if you will. 

It’s naughty of you to suggest we sup- 
port everything listed in GA ’s community 
resistance diary when you know “acts of 
community breakdown are also listed as 
well as clear acts of community resis- 
tance; both are harbingers of the coming 
collapse of authority and civilization.” 
And if even Malthusianism isn’t “fascis- 
tic,” why are all violent acts of resistance? 
GA doesn’t “distribute the early writings 
of Richard Hunt,” incidentally, except a 
few inoffensive posters. 

If we’re “forging a tendency to carry 
out civilization’s destruction,” isn’t FE 
doing the same by putting forward your 
analyses of it? Apparently not. “It is one 
thing to write critically about the dialectic 
of civilization and empire” and another to 
actually do something about it. The differ- 
ence is three years, how long three GA 
editors got last week. They just wrote too, 
actually, but didn’t confine themselves to 
safe areas like “re-creating community” 
with neighbourhood singalongs and home- 
grown lentils. All that’s fine, but as MOVE 
discovered, if it’ s working, the State bombs 
you. 

We did all that in the 1980s, along with 
PC moralism, economism, ideological ri- 
gidity, “third world revolutions” and other 
Hunt stuff. We’ ve concluded the only way 
to make space to be human is to get the 
State off our backs, worming away at the 
edges for restbite where we can — cultur- 
ally, economically &c — and knock-out 
punches to the infrastructure where we 
can’t. “Macho militarism?” We’re not 
surrendering ourselves to a military struc- 
ture or any-thing and if all resistance be- 
yond back sales is gonna inevitably re- 
create Leviathan, we might as well top 
ourselves now or, worse, get jobs. 

Watson doesn’t like Fredy Perlman in 
the same Into The 1990s chapter as the 
Unabomber. We bet he likes being in that 
chapter himself even less. While there’s 
still Feds, anyway. Like being Walter 
Pater, Dave? We can’t be anti-civ resisters 
as he’s not sprinkled his ideological holy 
water on us or rather he’ s trying to pull the 
plug now it’s getting stormy, out of his 
control. 

This “I am not a Watsonist” routine 
fools no-one. Another grand ol’ man did it 
last century and founded the biggest secu- 
lar religion going. John Moore can speak 
for himself, but the attack on his Primer 
sounded like “no catechism but mine” to 
us. All this about “nuanced diversity” &c 
what Watson doesn’t like is heresy against 
his sacred scripture. That’s why he ap- 
pended a loyalty test to his article on what 
most showed him up as a hippie, the sa- 
cred. Alienation shouldn’t be worshipped, 
it should be destroyed. We’re not gonna 
do that by reviving animism or liberal “do 
unto others” BS because Power just don’t 
work that way. 

Yours for the destruction of Civiliza- 
tion, 

John Conner 

Oxford Green Anarchists, UK 

Butthead Disses 
Cakehead 

Dear Fifth Estate: 

While I was pleased David Watson took 
a public position on both Green Anarchist 
and John Moore in his “Swamp Fever” 
article (Fifth Estate, Fall 1997), I felt that 
at times he indulged in gross misrepresen- 
tation. 


More than half of The Green Apoca- 
lypse — one of the publications Watson 
was allegedly reviewing — is taken up with 
documents produced by diverse hands, 
and yet Watson quotes from these without 
explaining what they are. For example, 
failing to identify his source as a reprinted 
leaflet entitled The Sordid Truth About 
Stewart Home — in which it is ludicrously 
claimed that I have sex with animals and 


that Murray Bookchin is one of my pen 
names — Watson claims Bookchin “is cited 
approvingly by the Neoists in Green 
Apocalypse. ” 

The notion of approval is a completely 
inappropriate description of the way in 
which the Bookchin quote is used, and 
Watson makes no attempt to establish who 
authored the piece. It is telling that Wat- 
son should attempt to conflate “the 
Neoists” with Bookchin, despite the fact 
that his ongoing dispute with this anar- 
cho-bore is of little interest to me or any of 
my acquaintances. Likewise, Watson cites 
the ridiculous assertion that “Syndicalism 
shows that it is possible to have a complex 
industrial society without hierarchies’ “ 
from an anonymous leaflet reprinted in 
the documents section as if it proved that 
“the crux of the Neoist argument is simply 
a barren, unexamined defense of industri- 
alism and mass technology.” 

As well as reproducing a large number 
of documents, The Green Apocalypse con- 
tains responses to much of the Green An- 
archist material it reprints. Since Watson 
reiterates a number of Green Anarchist 
slurs already reprinted and responded to 
in The Green Apocalypse, it would be 
advisable for anyone commenting on 


“Swamp Fever” to read the pamphlet. 

To take just one example, I do not 
intend to waste my time by repeatedly 
explaining how a satirical leaflet attrib- 
uted to a non-existent Green Action Net- 
work is not an example of “forgeries claim- 
ing to be from Green Anarchists.” It is, 
however, amusing to speculate that it was 
the similarity between the parodic leaflet 
and the politics espoused by Green Anar- 


chist that led Watson to confuse the names 
“Green Action” and “Green Anarchists.” 
It should be stressed that Watson’s use of 
the capitalized plural term “Green Anar- 
chists” can be explained as a typo, or as a 
deliberate attempt to ensnare careless read- 
ers. Watson might like to clarify his posi- 
tion on this. 

Watson’s failure to provide a credible 
summary of the arguments to be found in 
The Green Apocalypse can be illustrated 
by his claim that: “Around the time of the 
Persian Gulf War, everyone in the dispute 
agrees, Green Anarchist founder Richard 
Hunt went over to an explicit right-wing 
or ecofascist position.” While I have ar- 
gued that Hunt was a founder of Green 
Anarchist, reprinted in the documents sec- 
tion of The Green Apocalypse are materi- 
als in which the current editors of the 
publication implausibly deny this. 

Watson seems to ag'ree with some of 
the arguments I have made about the right- 
wing nature of Hunt’s ideology but the 
word “explicitly” is misleading. My view 
is that Hunt’s positions have always been 
right-wing regardless of the fact that he 
still claims to be a part of the political left. 
Likewise, from material reprinted in The 
Green Apocalypse, it is clear that the pub- 


lic line of the current editors of Green 
Anarchist is that Hunt held left-wing views 
prior to the Gulf War, before inexplicably 
turning fascist overnight. This position 
appears to have been adopted because in 
texts such as Green Anarchism: Its Ori- 
gins And Influences, the current editors of 
Green Anarchist use Hunt’s theories as an 
ideological framework for their ongoing 
activities. 

Watson misrepresents the positions of 
all those involved in the dispute he is 
writing about. To deal thoroughly with the 
many errors “Swamp Fever” contains 
would take more time than I am prepared 
to devote to the task. Besides, it is point- 
less attempting to engage Watson in de- 
bate since his rhetoric is even more ridicu- 
lous than that of an old tailors dummy 
which I keep in the attic and which I 
sometimes put out on the pavement, so 
that I can crawl inside it. Thus hidden, I 
frighten passing pedestrians with my ham- 
ster impersonations, while shying lone 
and languid peanuts down the street. After 
reading “Swamp Fever” and “On The Road 
To Nowhere,” I consider this hobby con- 
siderably more serious than the Fifth Es- 
tate. 

Indeed, Watson’s absurd posturing has 
earned him the nickname Cakehead here 
in London. He clearly hasn’t learnt his A, 
B, C of revolution because if he had, he’d 
know that the slogan “Long Live Death” 
was chanted not only by Spanish Falangists 
but also by those defending the Paris bar- 
ricades in 1848. 

Personally, I prefer the variant of this 
slogan that runs “Long Live Life.” Fi- 
nally, if you wish to print this letter, it 
should be run in full with the heading 
“Elementary My Dear Watson.” 

Yours faithfully, 

Stewart Home 

London UK 

Cozy Ghetto 

Dear FE: 

It is a lamentable commonplace that 
radicals all too often expend more energy 
lashing out at one another over relatively 
minor differences, rather than opposing 
the common enemy. David Watson’s 
“Swamp Fever” sadly confirms this tru- 
ism. 

I could spend time engaging in amateur 
psychologising about Watson’s motives 
for attacking me and the British green 
anarchists, but what would be the point? 
This would merely increase the bad blood 
and ill-feeling. But it is worthwhile think- 
ing about what outcome Watson hopes to 
achieve by taxing us with all manner of 
errors. 

Are we to beat our breasts and repent? 
Promise to mend our ways? Apologize for 
daring to deviate from the correct line as 
set out by David Watson? “Swamp Fever” 
is replete with Watson’s usual 
proprietorialism over certain ideas, people 
and places — i.e., the very things of which 
he accuses Bookchin in Beyond Bookchin. 
Has “Pope” Watson spent too much time 
mulling over the remains of “Dean” 
Bookchin? 

Watson has difficulties with the term 
anarcho-primitivism (although curiously, 
not with either anarchist or primitivist!). 
So do I, and the opening of my Primitivist 
Primer carefully qualifies my use of this 
term. These qualifications are dismissed 
by Watson out of hand. Watson is correct 
in warning against codification, system- 


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PAGE 28 


FIFTH ESTATE SUMMER 1998 



alization and vulgarization, but these are 
the very things I am at pains to guard 
against in the Primer. 

Watson ignores the anarchist prece- 
dents for the Primer (e.g., Malatesta’s Fra 
Contadini Dialogues or Berkman’s ABC 
of Anarchism) as well as the inevitably 
generalized nature of such introductory 
texts. The fact that the Primer aims to 
achieve a goal which others (including 
Fifth Estate) have signally failed to at- 
tain — diffusing anarchist primitivist per- 
spectives beyond the radical fringe — is 
not even acknowledged. But then again, 
once one has established one’s niche within 
the cozy anarchist ghetto, who wants to 
imperil one’s position there? Certainly 
not Watson! God forbid that there might 
actually be such a thing as “militant primi- 
tivism” (Watson’s words) — i.e., that 
people might act upon these impulses 
rather than merely play intellectual games 
with them. 

There may well be flaws in my Primer 
and “City Primeval.” I am the first to 
acknowledge that. But, given that they at 
least take seriously and treat sympatheti- 
cally ideas and practices developed in part 
by Fifth Estate and in Detroit, do they 
deserve such a hostile reception? Do they 
not deserve any credit? The answer, of 
course, is no. Rather than engage in com- 
radely discussion, Watson treats me (and 
the green anarchists) as hostiles who need 
to be repelled and condemned. Taxing us 
with being simultaneously derivative and 
deviant, Watson prefers to concoct a 
Neoist-style fantasy that we are conspira- 
torially cooking up a political tendency or 
ideological racket. 

No one should be surprised by any of 
this nonsense. As the Fifth Estate contin- 
ues to retreat from its anti-civilization 
— critique of the late 70s/early 80s, and as 
Watson shifts further towards that leftist/ 
reformist abomination, social ecology, 
those who continue along the anti-civili- 
zation trajectory — on whatever side of the 
Atlantic (or anywhere else) — are likely to 
be reviled. 

The saddest thing about this whole busi- 
ness is that the FE staff — without even 
bothering to investigate the issues — sees 
fit to endorse Watson’s position by pen- 
ning a supportive introduction to “Swamp 
Fever.” Some of us will continue to con- 
test the totality (or Leviathan, or civiliza- 
tion, the megamachine, or whatever ter- 
minology you prefer). Sadly, it seems at 
present that Fifth Estate will no longer be 
with us — and if Watson’s essay is any 
indication, will in fact be against us. 

In genuine sorrow, 

John Moore 

Rickmansworth, Herts , England 

Watson replies: If nothing else, the letters 
above, from Green Anarchist editor John 
Conner, Neoist egocrat Stewart Home, and 
(as he has been christened by Green Anar- 
chist) “leading British Primitivist” John 
Moore, painfully illustrate the intellectual 
poverty of the milieu my “farewell to primi- 
tivism” described. Despite the angry letters, 
I believe I went to great lengths to sort out 
the GA/Neoist controversy fairly and to de- 
fend Green Anarchists from Neoist slanders, 
before going on to what I consider the larger 
issues. 

I also felt a need to distance my own FE 
work from Green Anarchist and self-de- 
scribed anarcho-primitivists, and to raise 
some questions about their perspectives 


(and anarcho-primitivism in general), 
questions that I think were measured and 
fair, even if I took a few (well deserved, I 
still maintain) sarcastic shots at what I 
consider particularly objectionable Green 
Anarchist/primitivist utterances. For their 
part, anarcho-primitivists are apparently 
not satisfied with anything less than com- 
plete, uncritical devotion; for honestly 
raising important differences with people 
whose ideas I find fatuous and even offen- 
sive (and who after all advertise my own 
writing in their literature as somehow rep- 
resentative of or influential on their cur- 
rent), I’m accused of defending a “sacred 
scripture.” I’m not even allowed to defend 
my own views; criticism and debate are 
automatically perceived as attack and the 
counter-attacks begin. (I can ’ t resist point- 
ing out John Moore’s inability to recog- 
nize the difference between hostile con- 
demnation and honest criticism. He’s sur- 
prised that the FE might treat the claims of 
those who think themselves “with” us with 
the same skepticism we examine those 
who clearly are not — the same process of 
inquiry to which we have subjected our- 
selves. But if there is, “strictly speaking 
... no anarcho-primitivism,” as he wrote in 
his primer, what does he expect? He should 
be glad he didn’t get into an argument with 
us during our radical high point — according 
to him — in the beginning of the 1980s; we 
were a lot harsher and a little less fair, I sus- 
pect, toward those with whom we disagreed 
in those days.) 

I may have been inaccurate in reporting 
that Green Anarchist has relied too much 
on the early role and ideas of a founder 
who has turned fascist, Richard Hunt. It 
nevertheless does seem that Hunt gets far 
too much attention in their various histo- 
ries (even as his career demonstrates my 
point that primitivism, like other trans- 
gressive responses to repressive civiliza- 
tion, is not immune to the seductions of 
authoritarianism and the possibility of ethi- 
cal collapse). Why don’ t they scrap every- 
thing to do with him once and for all and 
start their discussions of primitivism, say, 
with the Diggers? Why is he anything 
more than a footnote? (And why are they 
so interested in publishing histories of 
their movement at all, when it has existed 
for such a short time and accomplished 
relatively so little?) 

John Conner considers me “naughty” 
for questioning his publication’s glamor- 
ization of sociopathic attacks against in- 
nocent people, random shootings and ar- 
son, Taliban mob lynchings, etc., since all 
such acts are only “harbingers of the com- 
ing collapse....” This is a rather flaccid 
qualifier from a magazine that advocates 
“the destruction of civilization” as a con- 
scious praxis. In fact, neither the publica- 
tion nor Conner bothers to distinguish 
what might arguably be justifiable acts of 
violent resistance from asocial or authori- 
tarian violence. There is no attempt to 
make sense of the disparate acts listed 
under the suggestive heading, “Diary of 
Community Resistance”; nor is any cred- 
ible argument proposed that they are any- 
thing other than the familiar, nightmarish 
accumulation of brutality that has gone on 
for millennia and that could go on for a 
long time to come. 

Furthermore, I cited Green Anarchist 
texts that call the Aum cult’s poisoning of 
Japanese subways and the neo-nazi bomb- 
ing of the Oklahoma City federal building 
“inspiring,” and their comment that the 
Unabomber letter-bombings and confused 


manifesto “expressed the best and the pre- 
dominant thinking in contemporary North 
American Anarchism,” and asked GAs, 
“What does this have to do with radical 
theory or practice? What does GA stand 
for?” I guess we have their reply. Moore 
insinuates I need psychological evalua- 
tion for bringing up “relatively minor dif- 
ferences,” and Conner thinks getting 
thrown into jail proves GAs right and 
righteous, that raising doubts makes me a 
cowardly do-nothing akin to . . . nine- 
teenth century Renaissance scholar Walter 
Pater (you really know how to hurt a guy, 
John!). 

Stewart Home’s sorry response should 
give a good idea of the incoherence of his 
pamphlet. Figuring out who said what in 
Green Apocalypse is far from easy, par- 
ticularly given Home’s stated project of 
scandal and scission, of “projection and 
unconscious mirroring,” and of a cynical 
Neoist manipulation and displacement of 
the “anchored authorial voice” that abdi- 
cates any responsibility for what one has 
said. But after once more reviewing the 
texts. I’m confident I got it correctly. As 
for his explanation of the origins of the 
cry, “Long Live Death,” it may even have 
been used by rebellious Roman slaves and 
Barbary pirates, for all I know, but it is 
most notorious as a slogan of the Spanish 
fascists. To use it and then pretend other- 
wise is a gesture as dishonest as it is 
vacuous. 

Sadly, John Moore substitutes volup- 
tuously wounded indignation for prin- 
cipled debate. But he can’t have it both 
ways. It makes no sense to start by saying 
I have attacked people over insignificant 
differences and then finish with the claim 
that the FE has been in decline for more 
than a decade, and that I am shifting to- 


ward “leftist/reformist abomination.” Ei- 
ther we have serious differences or we 
don’t. (Nor can one take very seriously his 
stated desire to avoid ill-feeling, given his 
letter’s rancor.) Even if my essay was 
unfair, Moore could have taken the oppor- 
tunity to explain, however briefly, his idea 
of FE decline and what was so remarkable 
about our contributions early on, or de- 
fended his thesis of the origins of primi- 
tivism in Detroit in his essay “Primeval 
City,” or explained what he means by the 
“totality” he claims to fight. There would 
have at least been an argument. We are 
supposed to accept on faith that raising 
discomforting doubts about such matters 
is only hostile “nonsense.” 

Moore’s disclaimers notwithstanding, 
to me the whole idea of a Primitivist Primer 
smacks of codification. (His claim that his 
primer somehow diffuses anarcho-primi- 
ti vism beyond the fringe of a radical fringe 
is simply delusional.) Though it’s true he 
qualifies that “[sjtrictly speaking, there is 
no such thing as anarcho-primitivism,” 
and that “[individuals associated with 
this current do not wish to be adherents of 
an ideology,” that does not keep him from 
forging full-steam ahead, explaining the 
term by (mis-) quoting an FE essay I wrote, 
and going on to discuss how “anarcho- 
primitivists” see things, and how “the per- 
spective of anarcho-primitivism” is more 
radical than all other radical currents, and 
even finishing up by establishing a net- 
work with a list of anarcho-primitivist 
“aims.” This approach parasitically pack- 
ages the ideas of diverse others (among 
them people who have little or nothing in 
common with one another), and privileges 
Moore as their hagiographer. When I, the 
first person he cites as a founder of this 
current, take him seriously enough to ques- 


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PAGE 29 


tion and distance myself from it, Moore 
accuses me of my “usual proprietorialism,” 
of wanting to be Pope of a “movement” I 
wouldn’t even care to join! He cannot 
seem to respect my right, established in 
his own introduction, to decline to be in 
his club. 

As for his essay, “City Primeval: Fredy 
Perlman, Primitivism, and Detroit,” I may 
be over-sensitive, but I doubt Moore would 
appreciate it any more than we did if 
others packaged his actual experiences 
and texts to fabricate some self-serving 
theoretical point of their own. People here 
were generally bemused or annoyed to see 
his lavishly inaccurate descriptions of our 
activities employed to argue that the FE 
circle created “the praxis that has come to 
be called primitivism,” encapsulating “the 
origin of primitivism [and] locating it pre- 
cisely in the lived experience of Detroit’s 
inner-city dwellers,” and that Fredy Per- 
lman, a ferocious opponent of ideological 
homogeneity and system-building, had 
created “a primitivist theoretical agenda” 
(an agenda one will now presumably be 
able to Find at least partially explicated in 
the primer of our “leading British Primi- 
tivist”). As one of the natives under the 
anthropologist’s magnifying glass, I think 
I had the right to declare his thesis of the 
Detroit origins of “anarcho-primitivism” 
(“or whatever terminology you prefer”) a 
wish-fulfillment and fantasy, and to point 
out its myriad problems. One would think 
that Moore might receive objections from 
the very subjects of his research a little 
more circumspectly. But dogmatism and 
defensiveness go together. 

Some words are in order on Wolfi 
Lanstreicher’s letter. When I read Wolfi’ s 
work I can only shake my head and pity 
poor old Nietzsche, misused and abused 
once again. Wolfi likes to skip along be- 
yond good and evil ; thus in an essay on the 
Unabomber (“Fixed Ideas and Letter 
Bombs,” published under the name For- 
merly Feral Faun in the Spring 1 997 Green 
Anarchist ), he writes, “The whole is be- 
yond reform and revolt against the totality 
is necessary — which means that attacks 
against any part of the social system can 
be worthwhile as long as they are aimed at 

taking back one’s life ” Critical of the 

Unabomber’s “fixed idea” of freedom, he 


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counters, “The only freedom I consider to 
be worth pursuing is that my life be my 
own to determine, that my interactions be 
my own to create, that my self-enjoyment 
be central to how I live my life.” This 
onanistic solipsism fails to recognize that 
our lives are never entirely “our own” to 
determine; we live in a world that forces 
us to choose. But Wolfi ’s fixed idea has 
interesting ethical ramifications — ramifi- 


want the good from you.” When Wolfi, on 
the other hand, concludes that he “will 
gladly sacrifice anything or anyone to cre- 
ate my own life and interactions as I 
choose,” and that “‘Human community’ is 
an abstraction,” one can glimpse where 
the slippery slope is heading. He’s al- 
ready living in the world he desires. 

Wolfi’ s logic brings to mind an en- 
counter in 1971 between Noam Chomsky 



cations that bring to mind 
Green Anarchist, which 
publishes him approvingly 
and praises his zine. Ven- 
omous Butterfly. He says 
of the Unabomber’s vic- 
tims, blithely, “The few 
deaths are no loss to me — 
in fact, I smile, thinking 
‘One less technician to con- 
trol my life.’ But killing 
off technicians one by one seems like an 
extremely slow way to destroy the indus- 
trial system.” (Perhaps Wolfi can con- 
vince the Aum cult to release larger 
amounts of poison gas.) 

Wolfi dispatches ethical problems ef- 
fortlessly. The question of violence, for 
example, presents no difficulties. In “a 
world in which individuals can create their 
own lives and interactions in accordance 
with their desires . . . conflict, and there- 
fore violence, is inevitable. It is the state’s 
monopoly on violence that I oppose, and 
when individuals use violence against the 
state (or any other aspect of the system of 
social control) and its tools, they are break- 
ing that monopoly.” Of course, they break 
that “monopoly” when they slaughter (and 
perhaps eat?) one another, too (and if the 
totality is the target, even baby-sitting 
grandmas best beware), but Wolfi won’t 
object. “Taking a life,” he assures us, “is 
not the ultimate act of domination. Forc- 
ing someone — or hundreds, thousands, 
millions, billions — into dependence on a 
social system that bleeds their lives away 
to reproduce itself . . . that is the ultimate 
act of domination. The killer lays no claim 
to the life of the victim until they kill 
them, and even then they lay no claim to 
the life but only to the ending of that life. 
. . .” He apparently wants to “democra- 
tize” or “socialize” violence, to redistrib- 
ute it; the state’s violence justifies the 
individual’s resorting to . . . anything. But 
as most people know, the State has no 
monopoly on violence. Wolfi’s is the gay 
science of a Freddie Krueger. 

“Verily,” said Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 
“I have often laughed at the weaklings 
who thought themselves good because they 
had no claws.” But Wolfi turns tragedy 
into farce, thinking the appearance of a set 
of claws license to do whatever he sponta- 
neously wills. He forgets that Zarathustra 
has just told whoever cares to listen to “let 
your kindness be your final self-conquest. 
Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I 


A little billboard 
redecorating from 
some anonymous 
friends calling 
themselves the 
California 
Department of 
Corrections. 


and Michel Foucault described by James 
Miller in his book. The Passion of Michel 
Foucault. After Chomsky had called for 
an anarchist society, “a federated, 
decentralised system of free associations,” 
Foucault challenged him, asking, “When, 
in the United States, you commit an illegal 
act, do you justify it in terms of justice or 
of a superior legality, or do you justify it 
by the necessity of the class struggle, which 
is at the present time essential for the 
proletariat in their struggle against the 
ruling class?” 

Taken aback, Chomsky replied that 
maintaining the principle of justice was 
imperative, despite the emptiness of bour- 
geois laws, adding, “We must act as sen- 
sitive and responsible human beings.” 
Foucault disagreed, responding that such 
ideas were merely repressive ideology. 
“The proletariat doesn’t wage war against 
the ruling class because it considers such 
war to be just,” he countered, but “. . . 
because for the first time in history, it 
wants to take power . . . One makes war to 
win, not because it’s just.” A revolution- 
ary regime might be bloodier than the 
regime it overthrew, but that according to 
Foucault was no reason to object to it. 
Afterward, Chomsky commented, “I felt 
like I was talking to someone who didn’t 
inhabit the same moral universe. . . .” It 
may not be a perfect argument, but one 
must stand wholly with Chomsky and 
against Foucault on this question. Wolfi 
has declared his position. Others must 
decide for themselves. I think it would be 
one more terrible irony if the primitivist 
insight itself became only another ratio- 
nalization for entropic madness, another 
ideological dead-end, another late-millen- 
nium, fundamentalist cult. 

We seem to be witnessing the break-up 
of the last remnants of the ultra-left. Its 
politics, from autonome to anarcho-primi- 
tivist, remain transgressive but can no 
longer be described as authentically revo- 
lutionary. In fact, what does it now mean 


to be “revolutionary”? We face a series of 
dire questions and uncertainties at a time 
when civilization itself is becoming in- 
creasingly unstable, and with it whatever 
human social and characterological ca- 
pacities that might promise a way out. One 
can scream more loudly, pour poison gas 
in the subway, send bombs through the 
mail, or commit group suicide in hopes of 
arriving at the other side of a comet if one 
so chooses, but that will only provide 
more symptoms, not serious responses to 
the malaise. 

Jaspers once commented that 
Heidegger’s “total conception of . . . be- 
ing” would inevitably become “another 
veil which is more fatal because it is pre- 
cisely with sentences that come closest to 
Existence that real Existence is apt to be 
missed and to become unserious.” One is 
reminded of the anarcho-primitivists’ mix 
of insight and palpable folly. Their sim- 
plistic opposition to the “totality,” their 
self-righteous celebration of catastrophe, 
and their grim conviction that their mili- 
tant posture is not only theoretically cor- 
rect but ethically viable, make theirs one 
more manifestation of a most tragic 
unseriousness. In his manifesto, their hero 
“FC” reminds them, “We have no illu- 
sions about the feasibility of creating a 
new, ideal form of society. Our goal is 
only to destroy the existing form of soci- 
ety.” My essay was intended to challenge 
that diseased logic, and the murderous 
certainties of those now attracted to it. 
That required defending (as 1 see it, of 
course — I shouldn’t have to remind people 
of that obvious fact) the primitivist insight 
from its own adherents. 

A Hard Anal Knot 

Dear FE: 

A hard Anal Knot keeps being tied, and 
retied, inside the collective skull. I thank 
David Watson for trying, one more time, 
to unravel it. (“Swamp Fever: Primitivism 
& the Ideological Vortex,” FE Fall 1997). 

Following the Bookchin, Biehl & 
Staudemaier definitions of “ecofasci sm” — 
“earth mysticism,” “biocentrism,” “a be- 
lief in intuition,” “holistic organicism” — 
this condition increases as we go back- 
wards in time. Our earliest human ances- 
tors were the original “ecofascists.” 
CroMagnons chewed hallucinogenic 
mushrooms in ecstatic chthonic rites in- 
side the paleolithic caves. They holisti- 
cally identified with, imaged and imitated 
the animals they hunted. Our sciences, 
technologies, medicines, musical, picto- 
rial and linguistic arts originated in their 
intuitively cognized experience of the 
cycles and processes of the natural world 
surrounding and within them: Homo Sapi- 
ens was virtually born out of such 
“ecofascism.” Is this what B, B & S intend 
to say? 

Today ’s descendants of these Stone Age 
Nazis are not the EcoHippies, Deep Ecolo- 
gists and Earth First !ers targeted by B, B 
& S, but what remains of our planet’s 
“primal” or indigenous peoples: the tribes 
of North and South America, Australian 
Aborigines and New Zealand Maoris, the 
Kalahari Bushmen and Congo Pygmies, 
the Sami, the Siberian shamanic tribes, 
the Berber Tauregs of Morocco: these 
“biocentric” and “spirit-ruled” drug-us- 
ing magicomythic pagan trippers are all 
ecofascists, yes?? 

Every one of us at birth, in fact, is a 
Total Fascist. From birth to age 8, we are 
those polymorphous perverse Luddite 
Nazis who “make the trains run on time. " 


PAGE 30 


FIFTH ESTATE SUMMER 1998 


After that, we “become rational beings” 
and never trouble the world again. Huh??? 

Something about “logical conclusions.” 
Just being born on earth, according to the 
B, B & S criteria, makes us inherently 
“ecofascistic.” We must then be separated 
from our sense of ourselves as living be- 
ings on living planet; such “holistic” 
knowledge must then be demonized to 
break and/or repress our passionate devo- 
tion to earth, which is the source — after 
all — of our life. But this “organic identifi- 
cation” must be condemned, disciplined, 
subverted and eventually exterminated 
toward the goal of making us all “rational 
beings” — i.e., like Bookchin, Biehl and 
Staudemaier. 

This is not a joke. We’ve been here 
before. To define our species as. in its 
“natural condition,” Ecofascistic, is no 
different from the religious idea that we 

How I 
Stopped 
Recycling 

Continued from page 7 

processed under uncontrolled condi- 
tions in notorious polluting countries 
like China and Thailand. In addition, 
most of the products which are manu- 
factured from what is recycled, such 
as park benches, traffic strips, and 
polyester jackets, can’t be recycled a 
second time. So, what you set out at 
your curb is only one generation away 
from a landfill. 

Michael Garfield, director of the 
Ann Arbor (Mich.) Ecology Center. 

notes that although all plastic contain- 
ers bear the chasing arrows symbol 
with a number in the middle, suggest- 
ing that all such products are recy- 
clable, it is only 1 s and 2s that can be. 
He says, “Recycling these are only 
slightly better than letting them go 
into a landfill, given the amount of 
resources expended.” 

He’s being generous if you com- 
pute the amount of energy needed to 
ship your leftover designer water bottle 
to China along with millions of others 
to be reprocessed, manufactured into 
a new item, then shipped back to the 
U.S., transported to a mall, purchased, 
used, discarded, and finally landfilled. 

It’s interesting to note how the last 
imperative in the ecological triad of 
reduce, reuse, recycle, has emerged as 
the one given prominence. The conse- 
quences of demanding an emphasis 
on the first — reduction of produc- 
tion — puts one on the path of confron- 
tation with the Megamachine, some- 
thing few people are willing to under- 
take. For instance, a campaign against 
plastic demands opposition not only 
to oil as a world commodity, but also 
to what the empire is willing to do to 
defend it. 

As I write, the U.S. plans for an- 
other military strike against Iraq to 
insure its control of Middle East oil 
are on hold, but the generals and poli- 
ticians are still in a blood froth. A 
good ecologist now needs to do more 
than just put tin cans in a curbside 
recycling bin. It requires being an anti- 
war activist as well. 


are, “by Nature,” “evil” “Born in sin,” 
“innately corrupt,” “heathen, savage, li- 
able to backslide into bestiality” — this is 
the traditional patriarchal religious de- 
scription of The Human Condition. Un- 
less, of course, we are “straitened” by 
officially imposed system of: law, moral- 
ity, ideological correctness. Beaten up- 
side the head, and B, B & S would have it, 
by Rods of Rational Praxis. 

Fascism is a State of Mind: the daily 
tyranny of Ideology Enforced by Terror. 
As David Watson argues: “Context mat- 
ters.” So does 3 million years of Hominid 
existence. So does the pragmatic ques- 
tion: just who carries the Biggest Stick? 

Without exception, it has been the op- 
portunistically designated EarthMystic, 
BioCentric, Paganlntuitive human groups 
who are invaded, colonized, enslaved, 
destroyed by precisely “higher order” 
states of national, religious and corporate 
powers. The conquerors always claim 
“progress,” “rational enlightenment,” “su- 
perior civilization,” and “scientific/tech- 
nologic advancement” as their excuse to 
rob, exploit and/or wipe out the hippie- 
naked, stoned-on-nature, “non-rational” 
communities. 

Late summer 1997, here in Humboldt 
County, four young Earth First! demon- 
strators self-chained to a tree stump inside 
the office of pro-timber-industry Con- 
gressman Frank Riggs had their heads 
pulled back, their eyelids forced open, and 
pepper spray daubed with Q-Tips sprayed 
directly into their eyes by fully-armed, 
helmeted members of the local Sheriff’s 
Dept. Who are the “fascists” in this sce- 
nario? According to Bookchin, Biehl and 
Staudenmaier, the “dangerous People” 
here are the passionately “biocentric” 
young women who chained themselves to 
the tree stump and refused to give in, for a 
long, long time, despite searing pain and 
cop-inflicted humiliation. 

The Conquest. The Inquisition. The 
Interrogation of Witches. COINTELPRO. 
Nothing is more “rationally arrived at” 
than the torture room. Concentration 
camps. Every prison cell. Are B, B & S 
this ignorant of human psychological his- 
tory, or are they just flat-out liars? In 
either case, how much time and energy 
has been spent in a decade of diversionary 
debate with, and within, their retro terms: 
terms which define “the Enemy” as our 
constituent matter in its functional trance 
of bioconscious interconnection with all 
sentient and dreamt things of the cos- 
mos — an “enemy” they dogmatically pre- 
sume to attack, denounce and replace one 
more time with “man’ s plan for Your Life” 
(i.e., read their books). 

The introduction to Biehl and 
Staudenmaier’ s Lessons from the German 
Experience, states: “ecological ideas have 
a history of being distorted and placed in 
the service of reactionary ends — even of 
fascism itself.” Substitute “rational ideas” 
(or “religious ideas” or “liberal ideas” or 
“scientific ideas” or “esthetic ideas” or 
any kind of ideas) for B & S’s “ecological 
ideas” if you need a measure of the stun- 
ning uselessness and banality of their defi- 
nitions. 

German Fascists also: breathed air 
drank water ate food fucked slept pissed 
shit and sweat. They used their language 
to affect and manipulate the world. They 
sat at their desks and wrote books. So do 
Staudenmaier, Biehl and Bookchin. So do 
we all. Therefore . . .? 

Barbara Mor 

Eureka, CA 


Multi-Use Name 

Hi there: 

This may be of some interest to your 
readers regarding “Swamp Fever.” In his 
essay on the “ugly dispute” between the 
Neoist Alliance and Green Anarchist, 
David Watson repeatedly mentioned one 
“Luther Blissett.” 

Watson is apparently not aware of the 
fact that LB, far from being a single au- 
thor, is a multi-use-name, an open identity 
adopted by several people and radical 
groups all over Europe. The Luther Blissett 
Project — named after a retired Afro-Car- 
ibbean soccer player — is not a “neoist” 
thing either. That name may have been 
used by the Neoist Alliance (which is not 
really a “neoist” thing itself), but since 
1994 it’s also been widely adopted by 
hundreds of radicals, ultra leftist prank- 
sters and “anti-media guerrillas” in Ger- 
many, Spain and especially Italy, where 
LB’s most famous actions and scams got 
journalists fired, court trials sabotaged, 
corporate money wasted, even a phony 
Hakim Bey book published etc. 

While the concept of “Luther Blissett” 
as a “collective cultural terrorist” stems 
from such Marxian notions as the “Gen- 
eral Intellect” (from the Grundrisse) and 
the Gemeinwesen/Gattungswesen (the 
community-species being), the Project is 
no playground for wannabe academics or 
middle-class tossers. LB’s praxis includes 
both grassroots sabotage and high-level 
technological hoaxes. 

You might find the Luther Blissett 
Project too “marxist” (or even 
“postmodernist”) — certainly it’s got no 
discernible “primitivist” stance, but if you 
are curious (and monoglot)~you can visit 
the following English language website: 
http://www.ecn.org/deviazioni/blissett 
(mirror site at www.geocities.com/Area5 1/ 
Rampart/6812). 

There’s plenty of books and other 
material by/on LB available in Italian and 
German, but that stuff would be hard to 
find in North America. By the way, Trans- 
gressions is not a “neoist-inspired” jour- 
nal (if it were, why the hell would “anar- 
cho-primitivist” John Moore submit his 
pieces?). It is published by the Geography 
Department of the University of 
Newcastle, UK. 

Belletati 

London 

History of the @ 

Dear FE: 

In your Summer 1997 issue I read a 
short note on the Circle-A, at the end of 
the article “The History of the Black Flag.” 
The author says, “Even harder to track 
down is the origin of the Circle-A as an 
anarchist symbol.” I can tell you the truth- 
ful history as a privileged witness. 

In 1964, the bulletin of French young 
anarchists (Jeunesse Libertaire) proposed 
the Circle-A as a brand new symbol for 
anarchists. That proposal had no follow- 
ing in France at the time, but it had a 
certain success in Italy, where my group, 
Gioventu Libertaria, Milano, on my sug- 
gestion, adopted it: sporadically in 1965, 
then regularly from 1965 on, not only in 
Milano but also in other cities by other 
members of the small federation which we 
were part of (Federated Groups of Young 
Anarchists). 

A European conference of Anarchist 
Youth, held in Milano (December 1966) 
and an International Anarchist Camping 


organized on the shores of Como lake 
(July 1967) helped to spread the Circle-A 
outside Italy (and back to France too). 
Then May ‘68 did the rest. 

Amedeo Bertolo 
Centro Studi Libertari 
via Rovetta 27 
20127 Milano, Italy 

FE Note: It may predate even the above. 
We recently saw a documentary produced 
for Spanish television on the Civil War 
which showed an anarchist militia fighter 
with the symbol on his helmet. 



photo/The Layabouts 


Vietnam: 
The Dirty 
War 

Continued from page 18 

we’re going to take the chickenshit to a 
new level. Nobody’s going to tell me why 
my friends died, but they are going to write 
me up because I'm not going to salute this 
asshole. 

I got late copies of the Daily News with 
the 1968 [Democratic] convention laid out 
all across the pages. I can remember walk- 
ing up and down the barracks when every- 
body was in there and holding up the Daily 
News that showed the police beating 
people, and saying, "This is what we're in 
Vietnam protecting?" 

I organized a whole lot of people to vote 
for Nixon, because I thought Nixon was 
going to end the war. I just turned twenty- 
one, so that was the first time I ever voted. 
It was all part of our protest to end the war. 
It was like we had an antiwar mood growing 
in the barracks. I can tell you, it got so 
serious— the harassment— that there was 
a discussion about killing one sergeant. 
That's always been amazing to me. We 
were not a line unit, an infantry unit, [where] 
killing was normal, but we discussed 
whether we should kill them. It was that 
kind of atmosphere. Fragging. It was an 
incredible experience. It changed my life. I 
can remember actually thinking that that 
twenty-first birthday was the first day that I 
can remember that I wanted to mark things 
from. 

I came backthe day before Christmas in 
1 968, totally stressed out and anguished. I 
came back and dressed up in my uniform 
and went to midnight mass with the family 
because I wanted that attention, respect, 
acknowledgment. I still wanted something 
to be proud of. Stuff never goes away like 
that. At midnight mass, all the priest talked 
about was grace. I can remember leaving 
the church in a new level of anger because 
people were dying— this asshole doesn't 
say anything about what's going on in the 
world. 


SUMMER 1998 FIFTH ESTATE 


PAGE 31 



Women praying at an Islamic school in Jakarta, Indonesia for a solution to the country’s financial crisis. 

The Shoplifter’s Prayer 

M ay the intercession of the glorious gift, o holy Thief, free us 
from the bitter commodity & deliver us from the spiritual 
anorexia of capitalism — 

O my goddess of perpetual potlatch, protect us today & always 

from the police, the managers, the mirrors, the security guards & 
electronic surveillance devices! O perfect parasite, divine for us impu- 
nity & the imperfect passions of free abundance. 

W e supplicate thee lords of libertarian license that all our 

thoughts & actions may principally focus on the cause of inter- 
national anarchist revolution by the intercession of our Saints Gold- 
man, Berkman, Bakunin & beyond. Grant us the courage to take what 
is rightfully ours as we rip off the bosses, bureaucrats & businessmen 
at all times proper & favorable for the liberation of desire. 

M ay we never submit to the will of the State as we eternally state 
our will to subvert the status quo until anarchy, ecstasy & chaos 
recreate the wild universe anew. Amen. 


— Sissy Sabotage